


Wilderness

by Laryna6



Category: Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor, Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor 2
Genre: Alternate Ending, F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-08
Updated: 2014-09-08
Packaged: 2018-02-16 15:19:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 43,806
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2274645
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Laryna6/pseuds/Laryna6
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>So the world's been restored and is no longer under the control of any administrator. Happy ending, right? It will be if they have anything to say about it, but the demons are in the details. Like politics, weddings and sudden species changes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Think of this as the Anguished One’s equivalent of Daichi’s Perfect Ending, requiring everyone at level five and all possible recruits.
> 
> While I was thinking about the original idea for this, I decided to change one more thing about the Anguished One’s ending. While I was writing, I really wanted to have Ronaldo to use as a viewpoint character. While I was playing I thought that while Yamato’s suicide made perfect sense because of his mental state and specific issues, Ronaldo becoming irrational and randomly tackling someone that wasn’t Yamato and wouldn’t actually be coming totally out of left field? Because of the relationship he had with the group, Ronaldo most likely would have heard about the Nicaea administrator and probably would have wanted to recruit him so he had a source of information on Polaris that didn’t ultimately come from Yamato. In fact, we see the Anguished One with civilians on the outside a few times, and given what he did during human history it seems likely that he was doing what he could to help them. For those reasons, Ronaldo’s reaction to him felt far too much like a Deus Angst Machina when compared to how he acts in the other routes. Again, Yamato I’d expect this from because he has no idea how normal people act, but why is Ronaldo acting like he’s been jilted?
> 
> According to TVTropes a manga adaptation of DS2 named the MC Hiro, so I used that for the fic. I named him Shinji Meguro in the game, both as a reference to the Eva references and to the SMT series’ excellent soundtrack composer (although sadly the credits for this game don’t list him).

“Huh…!? What, what is this place?” Daichi asked, feeling the sand shift under his shoes as he shifted his weight, smelling the sea air after so long trapped in cities surrounded by nothingness and then the strange, dead air of Polaris’ realm.

“It’s the new world,” Hiro told him, even though they both knew Daichi knew that. It was just hard for Daichi to believe that it was real, that they’d really won, that they were going to survive until he heard Hiro say it.

“Correct. This is your new world. You will no longer be bound by anything,” they heard.

“Huh?!” Daichi asked, startled. “That voice… Is that Saiduq? He looked behind him and was not just startled but shocked to see that Saiduq hadn’t appeared there. He _always_ did that. But not this time. “Where are you?”

“I am before you.” Since the Shining One had asked him not to appear behind him again. Of course, he was behind him as well, but he couldn’t quite help that anymore because, “I am now the world. All will be with you.”

“You won’t show yourself?” Hiro asked, not jumping around the way Daichi had but looking around, scanning the horizon, trying to recognize his friend in this world. He couldn’t. This was a new world, but a new human world. Another earth, made for them. The sunlight, the light on the waves, the messy strands of kelp already getting swept up onto the beach? After a week trapped inside shrinking bubbles of cityscape, the sheer naturalness of this place hit him like a blow, shocking him out of the determination to survive and keep his friends alive at all costs that had held him together and let him hold them together.

It was over. This was their world once again, not one that creatures from beyond the stars, from the Akashic Record could just waltz into and start deleting.

Or appear in and start helping.

Saiduq wouldn’t fit into this scene any more than he had into Tokyo: despite the crazy things people wore and the crazy people who came there to see and be seen, Saiduq had seemed subtly _off_. In a place without any straight lines or right angles, just the curves of wave and leaf, wouldn’t alien geometries stand out even more?

Saiduq had created a world for humanity, Hiro realized. That was their bargain, that was what Saiduq had wished for all along but been unable to achieve without someone else’s guidance. There was no room in this world for the septentriones.

None for Saiduq himself.

“I have no physical form now, but I need none. This world requires no administrator,” Saiduq said to Daichi, and Hiro knew that his fears had been confirmed. If there was no need for any administrator, and Saiduq was the administrator?

He would have no need for a body to use to speak to Hiro or his other friends if he was _dead_.

“You’re going to die and take Heaven’s Throne with you? That wasn’t part of our deal!”

“The Akashic Records must be destroyed so there is nothing to dictate humanity’s future but their will and their will alone, Shining One. I am a being of the Akashic Records.

“Then rewrite yourself into a demon before the administrator account is fully deleted?” Fumi suggested, her normally detached voice at the same level of, ‘I am only somewhat amused by your bullshit,’ as when she’d proceeded to multi-strike the Trumpeter, whose horn would break the seals turning the seas to blood and destroying the world, with laptops until he damn well did what she’d told him to do. Even though he’d proclaimed that he’d only obey God himself, was readying himself to destroy these humans for their hubris.

She was impressed by Yamato dying for his ideals, that that didn’t mean she’d liked it any more than the others had. So he wanted there to be no more administrators? Fine. But there was another way: he could stop being that administrator.

“Oh,” Saiduq said, appearing in front of Hiro, since he’d asked… But behind Fumi. “That hadn’t occurred to me.”

Since even he could tell by the way everyone was staring at him that they were just as surprised and confused as humans usually made him, he added, “I did think of turning into a human once,” or rather wished he could know that freedom and potential, “but the reason I can’t understand you that well is that the human mind and we Septentriones… Or the way we were,” since there were no Septentriones anymore, “are fundamentally incompatible. I wouldn’t be able to think or feel properly with a human brain, and I didn’t want to burden you with something like that.” Didn’t want them to remember him as a drooling infant, unable to understand words without the translation protocols he’d struggled to write into himself over these millennia of trying to interact with them in a positive way.

Keita shuddered at the idea of ending up a weak and helpless baby after being one of the strongest things around. Saiduq might have looked like a human and fought like one while working with Hiro, but Keita knew what the others had looked like, what they’d been able to do. He still didn’t get why Saiduq hadn’t turned into this any of the times he’d gotten in trouble, rushing around the battlefield to assist the rest of them. Even Keita, although at least the alien had an excuse for not being able to get that Keita hated that, dammit.

Even Fumi supposed that under the circumstances, she wouldn’t punish him for nearly just letting himself get erased like that. The thought of losing her mind, remembering her lost genius but being unable to think, unable to understand anything about the universe: what a nightmare.

“I am a doctor,” Otome pointed out. “I could have looked after you, and I’m sure the others would have helped.” Jungo, Makoto, Daichi, Io and Hiro would have jumped right in, and she knew the others would have done whatever needed to be done for one of them, however grudgingly. “Unless you didn’t want to live like that.” Like the patients whose minds were too far gone to even ask to be taken off life support. Nothing in there that could think, or feel, or enjoy life.

“The will to live, finding a reason to live: those aren’t something I could feel, even though the Shining One’s explanation helped.” Such admirable creatures, struggling so hard to find and fulfill purpose instead of having one handed to them at creation. Not _wanting_ to have one be handed to them at creation, perhaps because this would demean both them and the concept of purpose itself in some way?

“Hey, are you okay?” Daichi wondered. “You’re…” Bouncing? Shaking?

Bobbing up and down was probably the best description, even if it seemed too cheerful and juvenile for Saiduq. Even though his cluelessness about human behavior coupled with good-intentioned apology made him seem like something of an airhead when he tried to talk to people, they’d seen too many Septentriones to underestimate him. To forget the power and alien will that was leashed there, the iron hand in the white puffball glove. Or head.

Clearly, combs were among the many human things Saiduq still hadn’t grasped after millennia of observation.

Not that he needed a comb anymore.

The black cube within a larger shape that looked like the outline of a cube in gold – consisting of only the edges, without the sides filled in – stopped moving. “I am fine. Thank you for your concern,” he added.

“You’re one of us, you know?” Daichi thought it was a little weird how weird it wasn’t, to talk to someone that didn’t look at all human. They’d already known he wasn’t human, though, and it wasn’t like they hadn’t talked to demons over the past week.

“Aww, don’t stop,” Joe said with his casual smile. “You looked happy. Like this dog a friend of mine had, that’d practically levitate when she came home, he was jumping up and down so fast.” Only Saiduq was actually levitating literally.

“If you don’t mind, Shining One?” Saiduq asked Hiro, of course. Which just made Ronaldo agree with Joe even more. He admired dogs: such loyal creatures.

“What do you want to do?” Hiro asked him, which seemed like an odd response until the others remembered that the former septentrione _was_ odd. Maybe that was why Hiro became their leader so fast, not just his strength and tactics. He’d listen to people, figure out their languages.

The cube was silent for awhile, thinking, then it resumed moving up and down, not so much bouncing as happy? Energetic? Raring to go or excited at all the potential?

Such a change from the Anguished One, mourning the world he’d cared for and the people he’d helped. Blaming himself, because by giving the Hotsuin family and Yamato the power and knowledge to protect their world, he’d caused its end. All he’d been able to do was try to give them some tools to survive, despite already knowing the future preserved in the Akashic Record.

“I think my first purpose should be learning human social mores and interaction. Oh, yes!” The cube suddenly realized something and vanished in a blur of light that beamed up into the sky… Then paused and came back down again before solidifying again, this time into a human form. “First I forgot to transform into a human body, and then I forgot that I can’t do that by accessing the Akashic Record anymore, but under my own power.” Oh dear. “I’m so used to accessing it, and now I’ll have to rely on my memory.” Which, as this had just proved, was absolutely abysmal due to lack of use.

“Write yourself a scheduling program,” Fumi recommended. “That’s how I keep track of things like what clothing I should wear.”

“…But you wear the same thing every day.” And coming from Makoto, who wore a uniform, that said something.

“Yes,” Fumi agreed. “Thanks to careful planning.” She’d gotten these shirts in bulk. She hated clothes shopping. “So do they.” She waved at most of the group, “So what’s your point.”

“That’s because we didn’t have any other clothes,” Io explained, a little embarrassed. “Thank you again for doing our laundry every night,” she said to Makoto.

“It’s fine. Actually, I just had them put it in with the uniforms.”

Airi was openly staring, while Hinako was grinning. “We have got to go shopping, girls. And you too,” she told Saiduq. Not only did he probably not own any other clothing, but that outfit was incredibly dorky. Well, yes, he was a bit of a dork, but he’d be a cute one if he got a little meat on his bones and color in his cheeks so he looked less like a shut-in scarecrow.

Wait. Thin, pale: he looked a bit like Fumi. Well, they were both programmers. Pale as though the only light they got was from a monitor. She half-turned, the rising sun bringing out more shades in her ginger hair. Well, they had a beach right here! All they needed was sunscreen.

Keita gave her a look. “Uh, where?” he muttered under his breath. You idiot. He found himself holding back the volume because even though it was the truth, he didn’t want to burst her bubble. To remind them that everyone was still dead.

“Right: We should start looking for water.” Unlike the others, Ronaldo hadn’t been living off JP’s resources. He’d gotten not so much a crash course in survivalism but a pop exam. One that had been final for so many others. Wait. “You did remember to give us a fresh water source and some food sources, right?” On the one hand, this place had been created by a friendly alien god. On the other, the alien god was a space cadet.

“Oh yes, and coconut trees. I looked up human concepts of tropical islands.”

Hiro smiled. “Let’s go make breakfast.” Well, more like dinner. Either way, Keita wasn’t the only one whose stomach would be growling soon.

“How do you keep making this stuff!” Keita demanded, after a bowl of Jungo’s chawanmushi appeared in front of him. “It’s always fresh and just the right temperature, too!” He managed to sound like he was complaining.

“I’m sure there are shellfish,” Makoto said to herself, scanning the shore. She’d always loved swimming: when had that gotten lost in a dream thwarted?

Yes, it was time to take back the water.

“I’ll help,” Airi told her. “I used to go looking for them with my dad.”

Hiro and Ronaldo, with a little help from Makoto, divvied up the first things they needed to do. Ronaldo and Hiro went with Saiduq to find the stream that was supposed to be nearby, since Ronaldo seemed to have decided he needed a minder and Hiro was the one most likely to figure out what to ask him to jog his memory of what else he should probably tell them. It was a good thing he’d had the Akashic Record as a brain extension telling him what humans needed and what the new world should be like, because even though he was aware that humans needed to eat, septentriones didn’t. He might have tried Jungo’s chawanmushi, but while humans were reminded that food and water were urgent necessities they must acquire constantly several times a day, for him it was academic knowledge, like that the moon orbited the earth. Useful in some situations, like figuring out tide patterns for sailors, and certainly very important to the people who used it, but otherwise mostly trivia.

The kind of trivia Sherlock Holmes had made an effort to forget, to keep his mind clear of the useless. Maybe it was a good thing he was so, so… Him. After all, if he’d been a normal septentrione, he wouldn’t have really noticed humanity, let alone liked it, or whatever the septentrione equivalent of it was, and wanted to help them.

Now Ronaldo was the one struck by the realization that Saiduq was the septentrione equivalent of that mad scientist girl Fumi.

Hearing Hinako’s cry of delight followed by the loud meow of a grabbed cat and Jungo’s happy rumble made him stop in his tracks. Saiduq had remembered to bring Jungo’s cat with them?

Caring more than was considered rational about beings most people of his own kind didn’t consider really people, or sentient, just too damn clever and selfish for their own good.

Give a man a fish; you feed him for a day. Teach him how to fish, you feed him for life. And Saiduq had given humanity fire and who knew what else.

They were living in a world created by the septentrione equivalent of a _crazy cat lady_.

At least it was the kind that brought the really expensive cat food and probably some of those carpeted tower-things to climb around on, he consoled himself.

Hiro wouldn’t have sided with the guy and encouraged him to basically become the new god if he didn’t trust him, right? And Ronaldo trusted Hiro.

It fit, though. It really did. Ronaldo was a dog person himself, but what a lot of people liked about cats was their _independence._ Making a world where people could decide on their own what to do, with no god to boss them around or destroy all their hard work? A world with ‘ideal tropical islands?’

It wouldn’t be an ideal world of peace and harmony, but it was one he could believe in, all the same, as he watched the other two try to pull and tear a way through a large mound of some kind of flowering vine.

There was only enough room for two of them to be working at it, so he stayed out of the way until he saw something.

Surrounded by all this green, on a backdrop of pale skin, the color was hard to miss. “What are you doing?” Ronaldo reached forward and grabbed Saiduq’s wrist, tugging him back easily and opening his hand up: it hadn’t quite formed into a fist, but his fingers had folded flat in a reaction that wasn’t quite human.

Shielding the wound?

“You hurt yourself?” Hiro asked Saiduq, clearly disappointed. “You should have said something.”

“He doesn’t have any calluses,” Ronaldo said, which would normally have been an insult, an indication this was some rich brat that hadn’t done any real work in his life. Damn. They’d need all the workers they could get to build shelter and keep finding food once the easy stuff had been harvested, so, “Someone’ll have to make gloves out of something.” Oh, his hands would toughen up over time, and he’d get some muscle, but right now his skin felt as thin as paper. Calluses were kind of like scar tissue: they built up to defend an area that got regular rough handling. Like muscles, you didn’t have them if you didn’t use them.

“Since I had the opportunity to choose my abilities, I gave myself a healing ability,” Saiduq reassured Hiro, as casual as if he hadn’t just been manhandled and didn’t have a hand clamped around his wrist. “I thought I would finish this first: was that wrong?”

“If you’re hurt, _tell me_ ,” Hiro told him.

“And don’t heal this. I’ve still got my old scars, but no new ones. You need to toughen up.” Wait. “You’re not human: will this heal itself?” He considered telling Saiduq to make a new body, one a little more sturdy, but if he couldn’t look up human biology anymore? Maybe he should ask Otome to try to explain it to him.

“Yes: the standard regeneration ability is still here. I’m simply not using this brain or the normal senses for anything but relaying instructions and data, as well as perceiving what you perceive. It’s mostly incomprehensible to me, but I’m working on it.” The last phrase had the air of something he was trying out.

Right, alien space cadet. As a detective, too, Ronaldo knew how unreliable witness testimony could be because memories were so distorted by opinions and emotion, at the time and upon recall: that the mind could filter out even data that was important in hindsight or that the brain would fill in the blanks so people could be convinced they’d seen just about anything if it was done right. It was pretty insane.

If Saiduq was used to perceiving the perfect memory of every aspect of reality from the Akashic Record, the way humans didn’t perceive the world? It probably would drive him insane. Hell, look at Ronaldo, the way he’d dwelled on his mentor’s death, growing angrier and angrier until he lost sight of everything they’d both believe in.

And taking Yamato’s word for it? For _anything_? Oh, he trusted Hiro, who was the one Yamato confessed, or rather bragged to, but Yamato hadn’t remembered Ronaldo, or the specific man he’d had shot. Was Ronaldo’s mentor really the only man to ever look into JPs?

Ronaldo was used to being able to understand people, read people. It came from studying them, trying to figure out how to do it. He knew how to spot the crazies, the psychos, and Yamato was one. Al Saiduq was the kind that got eaten alive by them, so no wonder he’d just handed Yamato all that information, Ronaldo thought as he tore at the vines, frustration fueling his strength as he ripped his way through. Huh, it was thinner than he’d thought it would be. Saiduq was right, though: Ronaldo could already hear the sound of running water.

A few hard stamps tramped the vines down enough to make a hole big enough they could walk through it. He waved for the two of them to go ahead, since the… teenagers plural were smaller than he was.

“But I was just joking,” Hiro said as Ronaldo followed them through.

A small stream poured over rounded, mossy rocks, into a small pool where fish swam. The water looked perfectly cold and clear.

“Shining One… You don’t like it?” Saiduq sounded disappointed, head lowered and with the small blush on those pale cheeks that was one of the few expressions he’d learned. According to Airi it could mean anything from very happy to, ‘oh dear, I was rude again, wasn’t I?’ Maybe it just meant ashamed he was having trouble with something, and since he had trouble dealing with emotions?

“I didn’t say that,” Hiro reassured him as Ronaldo looked up the stream, seeing a small ornamental bridge over it, then raised his eyes past the garden to see the house.

Correction, mansion.

“It’s really nice. I’m sure my family can manage the property taxes. My cousin can chip in too… I’m sure they’ll all love it.” Hopefully Saiduq wasn’t picking up on the tone of Hiro’s voice. Ronaldo had never heard him so shocked or flustered. The kid had really buckled down to deal with demons and the apocalypse: maybe after so long dealing with horror it was pleasant surprises, mundane problems that he didn’t know how to deal with anymore?

It was very nice, not Western-style ostentation or gleaming white but woods that almost blended into the forest, plenty of porches and bay windows.

Ronaldo bit back the frustration he’d allowed to turn into anger for far too long. To be fair, “…I asked you about a stream.” So it wasn’t really Saiduq’s fault he hadn’t realized that he should mention that there was someplace nearby where water came out of a faucet. Ronaldo sighed and looked down the path to the beach. “And the shortest route.” When they could have followed the beach and avoided all the jungle that lay in a straight line between the beach they’d arrived on and this place. “So we’ve got a house.” Well, they wouldn’t have to build a shelter. “Wait. Your family?”

“I didn’t want to get everyone’s hopes up,” Hiro told him. “Did it work?” he asked the pale one, and now there was another note there, so different from the ‘it has to work!’ of the final days.

Hope

“Did what work?” Ronaldo asked, feeling those terrible hopes rising up within him indeed.

“Well, yes. Polaris was deleting your world, but I… Well, metaphorically it was still in the trash bin.” He’d loved studying human programming. First libraries, and now something even more like the Akashic Records, where people recorded their daily lives for no reason but that they chose to! Humans were truly amazing. “You see, giving humanity freedom wasn’t my dream, not really. It was the Shining One that encouraged me to let it be my dream, that wanting change and freedom really was… something that existed.” When his concept of the world contained past and future all written down, set in stone. “He helped me, even fought all of you, and I was the one that benefitted from it. So I asked him what he wanted, and first he asked me to restore the world, which was of benefit to everyone, not himself. Giving them the ability to make choices. When that was the dream he gave me.”

So by Al Saiduq’s logic, Ronaldo managed to puzzle out, “That just put you more in debt to him.”

When that didn’t seem to compute, Ronaldo realized that the septentrione had given humanity all those tools and knowledge just because he wanted them to prosper: there hadn’t been any repayment involved and he certainly hadn’t expected them to even be grateful. If anything, he’d seemed happy they weren’t mad at him because his presents had gotten them in trouble.

Yamato was just a jerk. “So you wanted to do something that was for him, not for you,” Ronaldo said, trying again.

Hiro hadn’t thought much of that other conversation about ‘the Shining One’s’ goals at the time, when there were so many truly important things happening. “I said he was going to be trying to do so much already, I wasn’t going to ask for a tropical island or anything.”

Which sounded like a tropical island was the selfish thing he wanted but was too unselfish to wish for.

Well really, Hiro thought, it was better than Al Saiduq trying to come up with something on his own. Still, if he was going to joke, he should have said something like how his only wish was for his friend to _stop appearing right behind him_. After days of skirmishes, attacks and ambushes, everyone’s nerves were hair-trigger. Hiro knew _he’d_ startled his friends far too many times, even though he’d tried not to.

Hiro’s phone suddenly rang. Realization struck both him and Ronaldo at the same time. He hurriedly opened his phone to answer the call and put Daichi on speaker.

“Hiro, Fumi checked her phone to try to summon a demon and we have cell phone service!” an excited voice practically crowed, talking so fast the words were falling over each other in the rush to share his joy. “Io’s talking to her parents! Where are you?”

“Go south.” Since the sun rose in the east, that meant, “Face the shore and go right,” Ronaldo told them. “You’ll find a paved path.” And probably a dock.

“Dad? It’s really you? Dad!” they heard Airi’s joyful cries over the background hum of voices coming through Daichi’s cell phone. She hadn’t really thought he’d be brought back, when he’d vanished before this happened, but she’d tried his number just in case.

“So he was…” Hiro glanced at Ronaldo. “Does everyone have their memories of what happened?”

“Of course, Shining One.” Saiduq was surprised that Hiro would even ask. Removing their memories would be removing their knowledge: knowledge and memory were extremely important to a being of the Akashic Record. Not to mention that he hadn’t had time to give them a choice of whether or not to forget it, and he hadn’t wanted to spend his last seconds of life, his own tenure as administrator, forcing his choices upon humans.

Hiro’s stomach growled then, and Ronaldo could see that he was torn between getting in the house and seeing if there was anything to cook and calling his family _now_. His decision-making abilities kicked back in, and he started forward. “The lines are going to be jammed. I’m surprised the others got through.Of course: we’re on the JPs network.” Which kept functioning when the others were down, so it had to be magical.

“I’ll handle it. You head down to the shore and get them moving in this direction,” Ronaldo told him, grabbing the alien’s wrist again, more gently this time, because this was clearly also something he didn’t quite understand but valued because it was important to his friends and made them happy, and Ronaldo knew he wouldn’t want to be looked at curiously during conversations like that.

Jungo joined them soon enough, with a headset Fumi had gotten from wherever she kept her laptops. His calm and short replies to whomever he was talking to weren’t as intrusive as Keita loudly arguing with some woman and Airi screaming at her father for faking his death. The two of them seemed to be bonding over their rising urge to simultaneously hug and never let go and murder their parental figures.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Take a look at all the gods and demons from different cultures that exist in Shin Megami Tensei. How the world came to be is one of the common questions, so each of those cultures has at least one creation myth. Sometimes they have several, all peacefully coexisting within the same religious canon: there are two different accounts of the creation in the Book of Genesis, for example. The Mediterranean as well as the Eastern attitude was, “Oh, you have gods? Cool, we have gods too.” 
> 
> So the proper historical religious kitchen sink/Shin Megami Tensei approach to having a few dozen different cosmologies and creation stories isn’t the modern/scientific, ‘wait, they can’t all be true,’ (which is called proof by contradiction) but to shrug, decide that they’re all true in that A Wizard Did It/A God Did It way (or just not care), and go to several dozen different sets of religious festivals, aka parties.
> 
> So yes, this fic implies DS1&2 take place in the same world. Yes, they’ve got different cosmologies and contradict each other, but this is Shin Megami Tensei, which has Shiva, Odin, Horus and a whole bunch of others in the same world, when their canons also have different cosmologies and contradict each other.

Al Saiduq had provided the kitchen with stuff from the category of kitchen stuff, and also fridge stuff. It looked like a very well-built and expensive kitchen, with a lot of counter space and cupboards. Lots and lots of cupboards. And since he’d only had a handful of seconds to figure out which data files from the Records he could fit into a demon’s mind (even though demons could keep thousands of years of memories they weren’t all-knowing), he didn’t have any idea what was stored where. Plans to have him help look for things failed when it turned out that although he’d kept language, and thus knew that flour was a white powder used for baking, he didn’t know the difference between it and sugar, and didn’t realize that ‘a white paper bag’ could in fact be this flour.

Makoto banned him from the kitchen before he put salt in her coffee. Normally Makoto was pretty patient with him. She should be, she was used to handling _Yamato_ , but coffee was coffee and JPs had burned through their supply of it during the first two all-nighters. Yamato, who never touched the stuff, hadn’t considered it a necessity.

It said something about the personal loyalty he’d commanded that JPs hadn’t revolted over this. They’d recruited people with trace magical abilities, and subconscious use of them took energy, like everything else. According to Otome, they often self-medicated with caffeine and everything else energy-boosting they could find, including herbs that boosted magical power and would actually make the energy drain worse, while alcohol opened minds and lowered barriers, making it incredibly dangerous. Sometimes street drugs, if JPs didn’t get to them first.

The planned victory feast instead turned into hours of people putting whatever was put in front of them into their mouths in between sentences while their attention was focused on their cell phones instead of each other, or that was what one would have assumed.

Hinako tooki Fumi’s phone when she saw she was fiddling with it instead of talking to people, and seeing that, Al Saiduq had offered his to Hiro. Al Saiduq shouldn’t be on the JPs network, but the answer to why it worked even though the normal networks must be flooded right now was so obviously magic, even if now the answer was demon magic instead of alien magic, that no one batted an eye as Hiro carried on a three-way conversation with his father and his cousin, his mother and older brother coming in and talking on speaker after she got back from checking on their neighbors and his brother met up with their cousin halfway, since they’d both been going to check on each other.

It became a six way conversation when Joe yelled at him across the room, “Hey, Hiro, can we have the ceremony here?”

It wasn’t processing what Joe said while caught in another conversation that made Hiro pause for a moment. “Of course.” Had he really needed to ask?

“Yes!” Phone still held to his ear, Joe said a second later, “She says to invite everyone; she wants to meet you guys!” Then he whooped, grabbed Al Saiduq and planted an extremely messy kiss on him. Everyone laughed, and then had to explain to the people on the other end why they were laughing. Joe grabbed Daichi next, since he was in range, leading to a squawk and more laughter. “I love you guys!” Joe declared.

“Stay away from me!” These crazy people might, well, be alright and valuable allies and a lot stronger together, but Keita still was sane enough to realize they were crazy.

“Run, Keita! Save yourself!” Hinako declared nobly (except for the giggles) before Joe grabbed her.

Io was blushing, because this sort of public display was just…  inconceivable, but really, she knew everyone here, and they’d just saved the world, and why not? She wanted to celebrate, to go a little crazy, to express herself. It felt like all the rules, all the social convention, the fear of upsetting others: none of it mattered anymore, after what had happened. So, “I’ll save you, Airi!” she declared nobly, grabbing and hugging Joe as Airi and Keita ran out the open glass doors into the garden. Fumi followed them, because it was the closest exit and she’d been around people too long, even these people. She wanted time alone with her preciouses. She wished she’d gotten a more useful magical ability, but being able to store away all her laptops and equipment was fairly useful.

She stopped dead when someone warped into the center of the garden.

Those traditional and impractical geta sandals. That silver hair in between Yamato’s and Al Saiduq’s. That distinctive robe, painted with raining code: had he known all along that the world was data, stored on a great system?

She stood frozen as he took out his own cell phone. “It’s clear, come on.” She ignored one of the two that warped in, but the other was that lucky, lucky bastard.

For a moment, she considered taking a laptop to his head, even though there were far better ways to make it look like an accident. It wasn’t as though she would have had time to be the great Naoya’s apprentice, not with her work at JPs. Ever since she’d tried and failed to crack his demon summoning program for JPs use, she’d known all the rumors about him were true instead of the usual wild legends. Even though the elite were often antisocial, they knew data transmission: rumors were forwarded almost as fast as the speed of light. This Atsuro-whatever looked so ordinary, such a dork.

“Will you find him?” the third one, with hair such a deep black the slightly lighter highlights seemed almost blue, like cheap black socks that revealed themselves to have been dyed with blue as their color faded asked Naoya. “I’m worried about Haru.” After what happened to her mentor? She’d sung herself into the demon realm when she felt the pressure of something trying to kill her: song was the universal language, the program code of that universe. If Lucifer hadn’t been impressed enough by their battle to remember him and his companions, he dreaded to think what would have happened to her. But finally finding out what happened to her mentor, losing Gin and all the others who were on earth when it happened, if only for a moment?

Naoya just gave him a look, and then gave Atsuro one that said, ‘Well?’

“I’ll find him,” Atsuro promised.

Naoya’s smirk said, ‘Good peon.’ “And this is why he’s my new little brother.”

“Yeah, right,” the other one said pleasantly enough it was hard to tell if he was being ironic, affectionately agreeing that Atsuro made a good bro or what, exactly. “See you.” He warped out.

“Naoya?” Hiro seemed a little surprised, sticking his head out the door. “Did you just violate your parole?” Well, more like a treaty. Had Naoya done magic on earth in order to get himself here because he was worried about Hiro?

Naoya snorted. “Your brother brought me here. He’s gone to fetch his minions.” Indicating Atsuro, he added, “And I have a chaperone.”

“Were were you?” Hiro blurted out. The others, who were about to surge out to greet the newcomers and ask how the hell they’d gotten here so fast and could anyone else do it, mostly froze at the hint of honest distress and betrayal in his voice. “I managed, but… A whole week and neither of you came? I thought he’d deleted you too! Did he?” Otherwise they would have come. He’d kept telling himself that he could do this, his big brother had, and he wouldn’t fail either. If they weren’t coming, it must just be because he didn’t need them, that it would all be okay. Even when he’d found out what happened to the rest of the world, if the dragon stream could hold off the void, there was no way the King of Bel and the Prince of Heaven would have gone down so easily, right?

The leader who had forced them onwards, told them they could do it, they must do it, and in the end it would be fine finally sounded like a teenager. Even though this was half a teenager whining at their parents and half someone parental, someone who worried about others, saying, ‘Damn it, you shouldn’t have worried me like that!’

Naoya had far too much experience to be out-stubborned by any brat of a little brother. Except one. “We were… somewhere else at the time. For us, it’s been a little less than _two hours_. I know I’ve told you that time can run differently between worlds. Or not at all.” Looking around at all the faces, he asked, “Where is Commander Izuna?”

“Of the JSDF?” Makoto asked.

“Unless you know of any others. She has red hair that isn’t dyed.” Rare but possible even among Japanese. Just like silver, it tended to indicate a throwback, someone with a bit of inherited power. Izuna, who fought with them and lived, Haru: he wasn’t surprised to see two more with his younger cousin. Those with power were more likely to survive, after all.

“She led the force dispatched to defend the first tower we lost,” Makoto was sorry to say, until she remembered that they were back, all the people who died. All the casualties, all the losses, all the people they couldn’t save, whose deaths they had to move on from.

Naoya snorted at that, then considered something, finally smiled. “So you didn’t have anyone competent in there with you? Your brother had me, after all.” Good job, that meant.

“Hotsuin Yamato, Makoto: there were lots of people who knew what they were doing. I would have been lost without them.” All the demons, all the seals, all the knowledge he didn’t have.

“Hotsuin? Really? Of JPs? _They_ don’t count. They lost all their half-competent officers a year before you were born, fighting the Shomonkai.” The Shomonkai had Naoya’s program: of course it was a slaughter. “As for the Hotsuin, Amane’s father even got the children,” Naoya said that as dispassionately as Yamato would have. “I don’t know who they found to help morale, but the Hotsuin are… Or perhaps they aren’t eliminated.”

Yamato? Daichi wondered why he was surprised by the thought that he might be alive. “He died during… that, so you did bring him back, right?”

When Saiduq nodded, Daichi shrugged ruefully. “I guess I just thought that if he was brought back he’d be here with us, you know? Even though he,” a moment as he searched for the right way to say it, suddenly reluctant to just say ‘died,’ even after seeing so much death. “Didn’t join us, he did fight with us. Not just against us, I mean alongside us.” Like he’d said when the idiot killed himself, no matter what anyone said, Yamato was the one who had kept them all alive.

Io agreed. “The dragon, Lugh… And he was there with Kama: Shiva might have realized he was responsible for it. And Saiduq tried to trap him there.” Even though he hadn’t known about that, he was in that city, with Alioth about to come down. Io thought that he might have lied when he said there weren’t any survivors there, even though lying to make someone feel better didn’t really feel like something Yamato would do. Especially under circumstances where so many other decisions had been ‘them or everyone’ and they’d just had to do what had to be done, no matter how terrible it was. “He was fighting alongside us, putting himself in danger when we were.”

No one mentioned what they’d found out about how all of this was started by Yamato in the first place. Yamato’s misuse of the septentrione’s knowledge might have been why it happened _now_ , but Polaris had as good as said that he intended to wipe them out. If he’d chosen an earlier or later time period, would humans have been able to defend themselves even with Saiduq’s help? Without fire and the other gifts he’d given them, humans would have been far colder. Hungrier. More desperate. And this last week had proved that when people were hungry and desperate, civilization fell apart.

Without fire to warm them, knowledge to help them better themselves, surely Polaris would have given up on humanity much earlier, when it was so much harder for them to care about anything other than immediate survival, when there was so little they could do to survive without resorting to that cold, ruthless practicality that was all Yamato had known.

“We wouldn’t have met you if it wasn’t for him letting us into JPs,” Airi said. “We would have been on the streets like the others.” She glanced at Ronaldo, remembering how they’d been well-fed while others starved, but wasn’t that necessary? Airi’d seen herself that Yamato was right: starving people grew weak, they couldn’t think as well, fight as well.

Yamato was… Yamato, but he’d kept them alive.

“So I guess he’s… back there,” Joe offered, adjusting his hat.

A lot of them looked at Ronaldo, out of the corners of their eyes or not. “I hope the police find him first,” Ronaldo said, and meant it. “That’s what my mentor would have wanted.” Not mob justice, even though Ronaldo had told himself it was an act of war, to stop him and get his food supply to feed the hungry during the crisis, used that to justify his vengeance to himself until he was lost to it.

“Or JPs,” Makoto said firmly. “They’ll protect him.” Even after everything. Even the ones who survived long enough to hear Yamato’s not so much confession as declaration.

Since Naoya didn’t especially care, he was examining the house and grounds. The architecture seemed suitable enough, and he preferred traditional, tried and tested designs to stark modernism. Not that the world hadn’t come up with more good ideas in the past century than in the fifty before it, with so many more people to have ideas. Of course, ninety percent of them were incredibly stupid in a good year, but that was true of everything both humans and demons did.

“He said that he was forced into training for it when he was very young. He’d never even tried okonomiyaki,” Hiro considered that shocking not because it was his favorite food or anything, but because that whole conversation was just… normally, people had that kind of ‘I don’t wanna’ reaction to _healthy_ things. “At first I thought he was like you, Naoya,” who deliberately cultivated his air of, ‘I don’t want to deal with you idiots, so go away,’ “and then I realized he just didn’t know how to deal with people as equals. I think everyone in his life either had power over him and forced him to follow his family’s path, or was a subordinate.” He gotten confirmation of the fact that Yamato didn’t have any clue what he was doing when Yamato’s friendly words moved from flattery, saying that Hiro was admirable because of such and such a quality straight to, ‘We shall be together forever and I’ll painfully kill anyone who takes you away from me!’

Actually, Hiro thought that Yamato actually _would_ want to marry him, because ‘together forever’ was (theoretically) there in the contract and the rest was just romance and other things only idiots cared about, as far as Yamato knew.

It was then that Hiro knew that he should _never let Yamato anywhere near Naoya_. Naoya was a great big brother, even if he was Hiro’s cousin, but that was because he liked people who did what he told them to do and got in less trouble, thereby causing _him_ less trouble, because of it. Like most really old people, he had a lot of wisdom, although another thing about Naoya was that he shared it in as few words as possible instead of droning on and on the way Hiro’s mother’s old father did.

After his older brother took him the first few times, Hiro had grown up taking the subway to visit Naoya when he was bored. As he made friends, they could get permission to come with him because there was a supposedly responsible adult involved, who theoretically would meet them at the station, even if the responsible adult stayed in his computer room working all the time and didn’t do any supervising except for giving them some money to get snacks in exchange for leaving him alone.

If it wasn’t for running into JPs Hiro would have taken his friends there to wait it out, since Naoya kept a large emergency food supply for marathon programming sessions. Hoping Naoya would get there while the world ended around them. It wasn’t just Daichi and Io that were a little cowardly, Hiro had to confess. He’d spend the entire time asking himself what would his big brother do, hiding behind that poker face because he had to keep it together, keep them together. And safe.

“No one has ever actually worked on this garden, have they?” Naoya said, voice laden with unamused doom. “It was just manifested in this state. Atsuro, help me find the toolshed.”

And with that the conversation was over, Naoya’s wooden geta and antique-style socks were placed on the edge of the pavement, his robe draped over a lamppost and he stepped out onto the dirt, grass and stone with a smile that was half-content and still half-triumphant, even after this many years without the curse.

The _inventor_ of gardening, of agriculture, the first human to learn the secrets of the plants instead of the language of animals, and his grandfather had taken that away from him. Every plant he tried to nurture died.

Small wonder he’d turned to tool-making, to smith craft: in those days there was little for a man to do that didn’t involve planting or killing, and when merely working alongside everyone else on a city state’s irrigation ditches could blight their crops?

Even though he still programmed, still shaped metal and electrons and watched the network grow and glow, there was a reason Naoya loved playing in the dirt, that this aloof brother more than fifteen years older than him was the one to teach Hiro the best way to dig holes and mix up mud pies for the plants to eat.

“They’re why you weren’t surprised, were you?” Daichi realized. “By the demons.” At the time, Daichi was too panicked to realize that his friend was going through the motions, far more concerned with reassuring Daichi and Io, with finding a way to survive this, than the impossibility of it all.

“Actually, I signed up for Nicaea because Naoya programmed something like that once. It was called the Laplace Mail.” Hiro was going to text Naoya about it after he’d checked it out himself first. “My older brother and Naoya, who’s our cousin but we call him our brother, were inside the Tokyo Lockdown. So was Atsuro. After nearly losing both of them, my parents, who raised Naoya too, decided to have me. That’s why my brother’s so much older than I am.”

“The Tokyo Lockdown?” Ronaldo stared at him. “That’s one of the classic conspiracy theories, like that American president. Even my mentor didn’t think JPs was involved in it at all.” The Lockdown was the province of things like the Ayakashi Monthly. The two of them might have become conspiracy nuts, technically, but they still detectives so they had _standards_.

“We weren’t,” Makoto told him grimly. “It was before my time, but Naoya’s right: JPs was almost wiped out months before the Lockdown, so the government was too afraid to keep the Shomonkai from openly gathering. It wasn’t until Yamato was seven that they were able to do more than just monitor the seals. That’s why the JSDF created a special supernatural combat unit out of some of the survivors of the Lockdown. Even most JPs personnel don’t have the clearance level to know about it. Can you imagine the public reaction to knowing that demons broke loose and a mass forget spell was cast on the survivors?” She looked at Hiro. “So you did have special training.”

“No,” he told her as he went back inside so they could close the doors and turn on the air conditioning: it was starting to heat up. “Even Naoya wouldn’t give me any.” If he was younger he would have pouted. “That would have broken the terms of his parole. He worked for the Shomonkai for awhile as a programmer, but he left and helped stop them.”

Yamato kept asking him if he was anyone special, if he had any training, and he’d been telling the truth when he said he was normal. Right? But the Tokyo Lockdown was years ago, and the people who dealt with gods and demons had centuries of practice saying the right things and handling them the right way, even if now it was to avoid witch hunts instead of to advertise their services or god. Barely any whispers of demons had escaped: he’d heard lots of conversations between Atsuro, the others and his brothers about that, including quite a few he wasn’t meant to overhear. “But I did already know that they were real. I mean, a couple of Naoya’s demons would fight over who got to babysit me.” Lily’s lightning and Gaby’s storms. “At first I thought those demons were attacking us because of me, so I had to make sure you guys were alright.” His best friend and the girl he’d talked to for the first time just that day. “And if I told you what I knew, and the government found out I’d talked to people who didn’t have clearance, my family would have been in a lot of trouble. Then I didn’t want you to find out because I’d kept you from finding out for so long and I didn’t want you to find out about _that._ ” It became not lack of trust, but guilt over something that might make his friends think he didn’t trust them. So they understood, right? Didn’t feel like he’d betrayed them by lying by omission for all this time?

After all of them had a chance to tell him that they didn’t mind, Saiduq asked, “Is something wrong with the garden?”

“Naoya has _issues_ with gardens.” And one created by a god as a gift for mortals? Naoya wouldn’t be able to tolerate something like that until it had the stamp of human hands placed on it. A _true_ garden was symbiosis, humanity working for the sake of the environment instead of simply taking from it. Was art, when the word came from artifice, from craft? From something people worked hard on, tried to make perfect. “Don’t worry about it. He likes pulling all-nighters.”

Fumi was staring out the window. Those _arms…_ they made her feel like, yes, like _science_.

Testing was clearly required. _Thorough_ testing. And a lot of data collection.

Those _calves_.


	3. Chapter 3

At that point, the gleeful or perhaps desperate hysteria that consumed them when they realized they could talk to their loved ones finally subsided. Perhaps it was seeing someone’s family member, talking to them. Naoya was _real_ , so all of them were really alive. Living, breathing human beings instead of voices on the phone. Orpheus turned and lost Eurydice forever because he needed to see her to know that she would truly live again.

Maybe it finally occurred to them that they would see the people they knew again, and they didn’t want those people to see them covered in blood. Somehow, none of them had really gotten much breakfast, or brunch by that point. Airi and Keita had already taken off together to yell or be sulky at people in relative peace, Hinako and Makoto wanted swimsuits, Joe and Daichi also wanted them to find swimsuits, Ronaldo the bachelor wanted to teach Jungo to make something besides his trademarked dish so he’d have help in the kitchen and everyone found something to do with a sense of relief, because this wasn’t trying to find a distraction or do something before the end anymore. This was getting back to all the different things that made up living in a world that was hopefully much safer than it was yesterday.

Hiro meant to find a television and watch the news to see how the world was reacting, but when he did find one he ended up sitting down not to watch it but the window instead.

There were parks and landscaping in those cities, but not nearly enough unpaved ground to grow food for everyone. Even where it was relatively shallow, breaking up pavement had to be backbreaking work. They could have used their demons, though…

“What are you thinking?” Saiduq asked, following him for lack of anything better to do. He knew he shouldn’t dispense knowledge anymore, not after what happened to the Hotsuin family. He hadn’t given up the heavenly throne to be worshipped, either.

“I’m thinking about what people need to live,” Hiro told him. And of the reasons he’d chosen Saiduq, why he’d known there weren’t any other options, but he didn’t say that. He might tell those reasons to Saiduq if the former septentrione ever had doubts, blamed himself for whatever happened to the new world too, but it wasn’t very encouraging to tell someone that, ‘I didn’t know if I could trust you , but all the other options were worse.’ Especially when his trust had meant so much to Saiduq.

“A reason?” Saiduq asked him, remembering their conversations, the ones that set them both on this path. “Or the ability and right to choose a reason. I took the right to choose away from his family, didn’t I, by giving them such dangerous knowledge. Not to do anything with it would have been to just let others die, and that’s not something humans do easily.” That was why he’d programmed Nicaea to show those videos to the victim’s friends instead of to the victim. “So he wanted to make a world where everyone was supposed to fight for whatever their reason was.”

“Where he wasn’t a bad kid for not wanting to do what they wanted him to,” Hiro agreed, a little surprised by how perceptive a statement that was.

“If I had just replaced the world, then all of you who experienced this would have fought your former selves, and me. Because you’re different people now, and you would have refused to become who you were before, even thought it might damage the Akashic Records and undermine the new world.” That his kind understood, since it affected the Records, which otherwise encompassed past, present and future. “Then all of this would have happened again, as spelled out in the records, because none of you would have changed, circumstances would still be the same. I am also a different person now. I’ve changed because I met you, Shining One.” That name again: why did Saiduq call him that, exactly. “I am glad this happened, but it’s still… strange.” He’d grasped after the concepts of change and freedom, tried to encourage them, but for a being that perceived the records, that used to live in eternal now?

“What are you going to do now?” Hiro asked him as Saiduq sat down, belatedly realizing that he should follow Hiro’s lead and sit if he was sitting.

He’d known that Saiduq wouldn’t be able to answer that, would be some degree of stunned by the question, the concept of infinite possibilities and having to create a plan, forge a path, but he needed to start thinking about this. Unless he couldn’t. He just might not be wired that way, and if that was true Hiro needed to come up with something, for his friend’s sake.

“I don’t know, Shining One,” Saiduq said slowly, then thought about that response, realized the implications. “I don’t.” When he used to be able to know almost everything, including the certain future.

Hiro remembered all the questions Saiduq asked before, that they were questions, not answers. Hiro was the one who had to figure out what Saiduq wanted, what was behind giving them everything. It was obviously more than just that humans were a part of the records. It made his head spin to think that Saiduq had desperately wanted something all this time, worked so hard, done things that were obviously for a single purpose, to make a single change in the world and he probably still thought that…

Fortunately, Hiro knew Naoya and was used to things he would never get and shouldn’t even try.

Still, Saiduq seemed to think that Hiro was the power here; Hiro was the one that made this change, when Saiduq was the one who created Nicaea. Who attained the power of the heavenly throne and reshaped the world. Since humans were the ones who might be free, who might have the power to make change? Saiduq really wouldn’t have been able to even contemplate doing this without, even if he’d already been severed from the mind shared by Polaris and the others and they’d put him to sleep: why? Was Polaris worried that if the others could still share Saiduq’s thoughts, access his feelings, they might side with him?

Alcor and Mizer weren’t a binary system, but they were very close, close enough the septentriones were named for the number seven instead of eight: had Alcor really been that inseparable from Mizer once? Wouldn’t Saiduq’s twin star have sided with him if anyone did? Was it really change Al Saiduq had trouble with, or was it just something he couldn’t do alone?

Hiro was trying to understand the septentriones still, because they had been his enemies and one was his friend, but there weren’t any anymore. If becoming human would have driven Al Saiduq insane, what would becoming a demon do to him?

Saving the world didn’t mean worrying stopped, it just meant he couldn’t kill what was threatening his friends anymore.

In the quiet, they could hear the others moving around. Joe’s chatter, Ronaldo’s instructions, even Airi’s voice, muted by distance or insulation. Her father was in almost as much trouble as Kama. It was impossible to feel alone, impossible to think that they might drift apart when even when they were apart, a part of him still listened for them; their comforting presence still surrounded him.

Hiro himself was used to having his brothers as backup. Oh, they’d never interfered when someone tried to bully him, for example, but they’d certainly supported and motivated him, in their own ways. Listening to Naoya muse about what he’d do to the bully if Hiro didn’t do something about it first had both given him gleeful vicarious vengeance and the knowledge that even if the bully was a jerk, he was still a human being and didn’t deserve things like _that,_ so Hiro needed to do something quick.

Or maybe it was that, once upon a time, he hadn’t had his brothers there to help him.

He knew he could do it alone, be the rock everyone stood on even though none of them had much support to give him in return, but he was pretty sure he hadn’t liked it at the time.

He wasn’t alone this time. Thank goodness for Daichi, for everyone.

“Hello?” he heard from the doorway. “Hiro!”

Atsuro would totally have been Uncle Atsuro if he admitted he was old enough. Still, being Naoya’s indentured servan-Apprentice made him part of the family anyway. “Were you looking for me?” Hiro asked as ‘Atsubro’ stepped into the room.

It was Naoya that nicknamed his cousin Able, supposedly for being a clever little monkey that very quickly learned to ride bikes, climb trees, take the subway on his own and do everything it took to get the cousin who just moved in with them to play with him short of actually picking locks.

Now, everyone knew it was really A _bel_ , but Hiro, when he was little, really did think that both his big brothers could do anything. Even put up with Hiro calling him ‘Can’ all the time because he’d misheard Cain, in Naoya’s case.

That was when he’d though his nickname meant, ‘if you sit there quietly, I won’t kick you out and you can watch all the (cool) stuff I do until you know enough to ask smart questions and then do it yourself.’ Which was _hard_.

It was a good thing he’d known enough about the interface of magic and technology to ask the right questions, though.

“Don’t get me wrong, I want to hear all about it, but Abel dropped Gin, Haru and Yuzu off and now he wants everyone’s addresses so he can get their people,” Atsuro said, looking at Saiduq.

“Mine doesn’t exist anymore.” The Akashic Records were gone: human thoughts and actions belonged only to themselves and the world they lived in. Without the Records, there was no way for a single being to monitor or edit all of those actions.

“Oh, right, you’re a demon.”

Saiduq nodded. “Now, yes.”

“Hold on.” Atsuro fished around in one of his pockets. Digging out a business card case, he frowned, put it back in, and kept digging until he pulled out the other one. “Here,” he said, opening it and taking out a card. “This is my _other_ card.”

“Where’s Yuzu?” Hiro wondered.

“She’s talking to that new friend of yours.” From the way he grinned, Atsuro might have asked if anything happened if he was still a teenager (although he hadn’t grown confident enough yet to just ask like that back when he was still a teenager) and this wasn’t a kid who had been in diapers when Atsuro was a teenager. ‘That polite young Miss Kuzuryu’ had a lock on formal babysitting jobs, but they’d still spent plenty of afternoons hanging out together with the baby in the room so they could keep an eye on him until his parents got back. “You know…”

“You and Yuzu didn’t get together because of the Lockdown, so don’t start that up.” They hadn’t started dating until years later because Atsuro assumed Yuzu was into his friend and didn’t want to get between them. “I’m old enough to know that Hollywood’s wrong and adventures don’t automatically mean you get a girl. Both my brothers are still single.” Judging from the terrifying way he’d delivered The Talk, Naoya also _had issues_ about being the result of humanity’s second act of unprotected sex.

Saiduq was looking back and forth between them like this was entertaining but incomprehensible, sort of like big Hollywood or Bollywood movies with costuming and special effects but without dubbing.

Until he noticed the rain suddenly falling on the roof, rising wind blowing it in under the overhang, against the window. “I hope he’s found shelter.”

“What is it?” Hiro asked, remembering how Saiduq’s first priority after Hiro allied with him was recommending Hiro find a safe place to sleep.

The gift he’d mentioned first was fire, so it seemed Saiduq did understand the importance of warmth and shelter to humans.

“Hotsuin Yamato.”

What? “What do you mean?” Hiro asked, avoiding sounding startled because Saiduq would likely assume he’d messed up again. If he already knew he was terrible at dealing with humans, he must still be afraid he’d mess up. Honestly, it was pretty clear from the start that he wasn’t a human, and he certainly wasn’t a demon, so Hiro put two and two together from all the obvious hints about administration and so on long before Yamato declared it like he was laying out a trump card, like they all had to hate the septentrione as much as he did.

“I did bring him back on the island, because he was your friend and you saw him die.” That should have compensated for Saiduq’s (Alcor’s) own death, as he went with Heaven’s Throne into nonexistence. Before, he would have said that he’d also hoped that Yamato would hear that Saiduq was fading from sentient existence and that might have made him decide not to pursue his goal to his death a second time, but, “He probably didn’t show himself to you because of me, Shining One.” Had it hurt, to see the only one Yamato considered a friend with the enemy he hated more than anything? How angry must he be at Fumi, his former ally saving Alcor’s life with her timely theory?

Ah-ha! “Naoya must have sensed him earlier,” Atsuro recognized. He’d learned to read Naoya’s smirks over the years. “That’s why he said that maybe they weren’t gone after all. They control the dragon stream, and the dragon stream is the energy of the natural world. The world that was created for humanity.” He qualified that with, “In some systems. Either way, humans are part of earth’s ecosystem and Naoya’s attuned to that energy more than most people.” Naoya was the first child of one born from the earth’s flesh, among other things. “If the Hotsuin are too, and according to some reliable sources they are,” Atsuro had figured out the government’s plan to destroy everything within the loop without Naoya’s help, and learning him from him had only honed his ability to ferret out the truth, no matter how well hidden, “Naoya would have sensed an unusual power point once he started looking. Even with this island’s chi the way it is.”

“So there is something wrong with it?” Saiduq asked, with that downcast look again.

“Not wrong, just new,” Atsuro said, finally dropping down into one of the chairs. “It hasn’t been shaped by living things yet. Don’t worry, Naoya will make sure there aren’t any missing microbes or anything that’ll make the jungle ecosystem collapse or alignments that’ll let the power flows get stagnant.” He wasn’t good with animals, but Abel was. Now Atsuro leaned forward. “Should I go look for this friend of yours? I’m sure he has enough sense to look for shelter, but take it from me, it’s not good to be alone after something like this.” A whole week? So much like the Lockdown it gave Atsuro chills even in thHe tried not to wince with sympathy. Hiro had survived, and he wasn’t going to rub in how bad things must have been by dwelling on it.

Saiduq looked at Hiro, knowing he was the absolute worst person to make this decision.

Hiro was already standing up. “I’ll go: he should talk to me.”

Knowing Abel, Atsuro didn’t even try to talk him out of walking through a jungle in the rain, with clouds blotting out the sun. All he said was, “Let’s at least look for a coat or an umbrella first, ok?” He wasn’t going to let his best friend’s little brother get sick, or explain to Naoya why he let Naoya’s other little cousin that also turned out to be a brother get sick. Illness still freaked Naoya out a little, after thousands of years before modern medicine, when diarrhea would drain all the salt and nutrients out of a little kid’s body until they just died or strep throat bacteria’s camouflage would trick the immune system into destroying the heart. When Atsuro and Yuzu were little kids, Naoya would kick them out of the house and forbid them to come within six feet of Abel if they so much as coughed, and when Abel or his parents got sick? They’d all thought it was because Naoya didn’t want to lose anyone else the way he had his parents: his mother died in the accident, but his father caught something antibiotic-resistant in the hospital while he was still weak from the trauma and the surgery.

Knowing a little about how nasty history was, Atsuro had to wonder exactly how many of his birthparents over the millennia Naoya had lost to disease.

Saiduq stayed there, following them with his eyes if he could do nothing else, his hand turning, over and over, the card that named Atsuro the Underworld and Heaven’s joint ambassador to Japan.

* * *

He sat in a thatched structure that couldn’t really be called a building as it only had one wall, with showerheads sticking out of it. At first he’d thought they were either ridiculous or hinted that the new god Hiro had so unwisely enthroned had a dirty mind: yes, he was aware the JPs locker rooms had showers, but who would undress and let anyone with a pair of binoculars watch them shower?

Then he’d seen that there were pairs of showerheads, the others at around knee height, and looked down at his shoes, caked now in mud, sand and bits of leaves.

Surprisingly practical, actually, he thought, at least until the wind picked up and he realized that it was fine to get one’s shoes and socks sopping wet when they could be left out in the sun, but now he had cold, wet feet, which he’d been told caused illness.

At least the structure gave him some shelter, but anyone walking along the beach could see him and the wind kept blowing the rain in under it.

Clearly, his employees were fools. For going to places like this willingly, in addition to everything else.

What would happen now? If he left JPs he would have no money, no identification, no records proving all his education and qualifications, or even that he was allowed to be in the country that he’d served! Even if his men were loyal enough not to inform anyone that he was responsible for the last world’s destruction, the government had made sure he knew he didn’t have any other options. That the outside world ran on who someone knew and who knew them instead of merit. Trade one master for another that would demand he prove himself by licking their boots and conforming? At least the government knew he wouldn’t be easy to replace and that gave him some leverage.

The trouble was that he wasn’t easy to replace, so letting him go had never been an option.

He remembered how all of them, even Keita and Fumi, had someone they wanted to call. He honestly didn’t have anyone he’d talk to without a good reason. Except Hiro, but seeing him accept that _thing_ even when it showed its true colors? He’d ducked behind a tree when he heard that voice; fast enough none of the others noticed him. So all of that Special Forces training had been good for something other than proving that all that talk about the wonders of nature and long walks in the woods was utterly delusional. Perhaps it was some means of handling the trauma of being worked into exhaustion, yelled it by men with more muscle than anything else in their heads & winding up covered in scratches and insect bites, since the Hotsuin family’s vaulted connection to nature apparently consisted of nature considering them particularly nutritionous. Or perhaps tasty. Like okonomiyaki.

Still, he’d say one thing for this place: he couldn’t feel the dragon stream. At all. No flows of chi, not even the little rivulets that flowed into the powerful ley lines, like the one bound to the defense of Japan’s cities, the one he was bound to. It left him at a disadvantage, but he had to admit that it was restful not to have that feeling in his head, that constant reminder.

The rain and surf drowned most other sounds out, but he could feel someone getting closer to him. That was one more clue to the real nature of Hiro’s latest acquisition, although it had never bothered to take a human form for _his_ sake, when it told him all the duties he was burdened with. It wasn’t alive, so it still didn’t radiate any energy he could detect. Even rocks had some inherent power he could tap, the blood of the earth.

Hiro had a rather distinctive pattern, even though it seemed forgettable to the untrained eye, he mused, watching rain pour off the roof from the untidy ends of the palm frond thatch. Similar to that new arrival, the one who detected him.

The reclusive computer adept Naoya.

Once he was old enough to be of service, the government had given him almost anything he asked for, desperate to restore and refine their defenses against the supernatural. He could have anything except freedom, or so he’d thought until he’d had Fumi take a detector to one of her trade conventions. That produced several good candidates: those with creative or summoning gifts seemed drawn to computers, to the trade of crafting carefully-scripted instructions that had to be as precise and flawless as a demon’s binding.

Yet the best candidate hadn’t just been rejected: there was a flurry of panic among his minders, and he was told in no uncertain terms that he was not allowed to contact this man, study him, or do anything except forget he existed.

Yamato hadn’t realized there was any connection between Naoya and Hiro, despite their shared family name. So Hiro not only possessed strong magical potential but it ran in the family? And Hiro knew Naoya used it? If they’d let him think of demons as relatively harmless, that both explained how Alcor could possibly have fooled Hiro after Hiro knew what he was and proved Naoya and Hiro’s other brother were both fools, so his family still didn’t explain Hiro’s intelligence or tactical skill.

Hmm, to capture Hiro and use that boat Alcor created as part of this attempt to win Hiro’s loyalty to escape with him or to take another approach? Surely Hiro would listen once he was away from that _thing_. Then they would work together to kill it.

Except it wasn’t Hiro that deftly stepped around the wall and in under the shelter.

Bone dry, while Yamato could guess at his own resemblance to a drowned gray cat. Noticing Yamato’s look at his clothing, Naoya said, “Yes, I’m violating my parole for personal comfort. People who tried to destroy the world in order for the sake of their goals shouldn’t throw stones. But you know that, don’t you.”

No, he hadn’t known about any parole, but he certainly wasn’t going to say that. Now that Yamato could see him, he realized that Naoya hadn’t necessarily deliberately disguised his aura.

If Yamato had written out a description of the normal, baseline human aura for anyone else, both Naoya and Hiro would have matched it almost perfectly. That wasn’t normal. Demons and gods had mated with humans for thousands of years: the idea that such a thing as a pure human without any supernatural blood existed after all this time was preposterous.

Yes, Yamato’s own aura was similar to theirs, which might be why he fancied he’d felt a kinship to Hiro almost from the beginning, before Hiro had shown his true worth, but that was because of generations of exposure to the dragon stream, which was purely natural power. Whether they had adapted to better control it or it had changed them was irrelevant. “You’re a Hotsuin, aren’t you?”

“No, but you’ve forced me to admit that you are. Is that how they found one?” Naoya asked, leaning against the wall. “Did they track down a descendant of someone who decided to escape their family duty?” Had they bought or stolen a child young enough to begin the training at the proper age?

Yamato laughed: as if they would have gotten away. If it was possible, he would have done it. “The Hotsuin have always made use of the most advanced technology and techniques to accomplish their goals. After almost dying when he was only a little older than I am now, my father not only found a wife but put a sperm sample in storage. The family trust,” administered by the Japanese government, “found a suitable egg and a surrogate mother.”

Naoya’s laugh… Yamato could _swear_ they had to be related somehow. “Clever. I would remember that story if I thought I’d ever need to produce a tame sorcerer. It worked _so_ well in your case.” Fools. Trying to own and control something more powerful and smarter than they were against its will? That worked out _so_ well for the stupid breed of sorcerers, the ones that didn’t live long enough to breed. “Now.” The laughter vanished from his eyes. “What did my little brother drag home this time?”

“You already know it isn’t natural?” Something that shouldn’t exist.

“The garden,” Naoya said tersely, as though it should be obvious. “It isn’t a copy of anything, unlike the rest of the world. Programs, spells or art: a creation will reveal the mind of its creator. Humans and demons all come from the same source, and their creations contain aspects of them in turn. All life on earth also comes from the same family tree. That garden was created according to classic rules and principles developed to express certain meanings, attain certain results just like any other programming language, and the mind that created it knew those principles. You could say I’ve spent a long time observing how people think, and all the languages they express those thoughts in. I’ve spent hours now examining that garden, and I still can’t wrap my head around half of it.” And if Yamato wanted to waste both their time, he was free to insinuate that this was because Naoya’s intelligence was lacking, but he’d prove himself a fool if he did. “Even though I know the language, most the concepts expressed in it are alien even to me. Yet it’s the half I _can_ understand that puzzles me even more.”

 Not what it was saying, but that it could say it. Some part of the universal language resonated with this creature’s mind, so why wasn’t the rest of it attuned? At first he’d wondered if his grandfather wasn’t the only sentience to arise out of the universe and go on to create, but there _were_ concepts he recognized buried in there: were they combined with the utterly alien or simply twisted into forms too alien for even him to wrap his head around them?

As thunder rumbled in the distance, one of the fierce yet brief storms of the tropics, Yamato told Naoya, “He’s one of the beings that destroyed the original world. They exist in the Akashic Records and control them, and us, by deleting and reshaping data. This one is responsible for my family, and has been manipulating humans by giving them information for millennia. Now it tricked Hiro into making it God.” Would this man believe him? Would he have an ally here, one that might be like Hiro, the second person he’d ever met who was worth talking to, capable of understanding him?

“Interesting.” Naoya’s eyes narrowed. “I’ve met plenty of manifestations of the collective unconscious.” This wasn’t simply one of them. If he hypothesized a type of being that had come into existence in such an environment without the intervention of man or god? “A third, fourth,” counting mankind, “power. One the others didn’t know existed.” Until now. Which was almost impossible unless they really could control knowledge.

Of course, that number wasn’t counting all the different human and demonic factions. The King of Bel and Lucifer had about as much influence on what the other did as any two human rulers of sovereign nations.

Despite all this, “As touched as I am that you’re so concerned for my little brother, have you considered that you may be wrong about who’s manipulating who?” Naoya knew that Hiro was just as skilled as his brothers: some things ran in the family. “You don’t have much reason to admire your ancestors,” despite Japan’s tradition of ancestor worship, “but do you believe in reincarnation?”

“Yes,” Yamato said, meeting red eyes with his own narrowed iron-grey. Of course he believed in things that obviously existed. Naoya might as well have asked if the master of the dragon stream believed in ley lines: it was just as patronizing.

“Hiro is one of the oldest souls in existence, less than twenty years younger than the human race itself. He remembers very little of it, but to make a long story short, he was the first doctor.” Stuck trying to deal with broken hearts as well as breaking-down bodies, hold together a family that finally understood that there was no going back. “It’s an old story: one learned to care for plants, one for animals, but it was the third that was forced to recognize that the proper study of man is man, that someone had to look after _people_ , because they damn well weren’t going to do it themselves.” Since Yamato clearly didn’t see that as a worthwhile pursuit (he must have hated all the people whose job it was to look after him, to shape him into a proper Hotsuin), Naoya explained that, “He was born into the aftermath of two world-shaking and incredibly stupid pieces of family drama. Even if he wasn’t compassionate, he would have had to be a fool not to make the connection that when other people made a mess out of things, it meant more trouble for him.” And a lack of godlike powers & immortality. “If it wasn’t for him, the human race wouldn’t have had a third generation.” Although Yamato certainly wasn’t going to be grateful. “And this wouldn’t be the first omnipotent being he’s manipulated.”

Now the boy’s eyes had narrowed, now he was actually listening. When Naoya was his age… Actually, when Naoya was his age he’d been in complete denial about the realities of his situation and spending most of his time ankle-deep in mud experimenting with cultivation techniques. Ah, such happy days of science. Tasty science.

Through a haze of pained exhaustion, Yamato remembered closed eyes, the source of his torment tensed as though expecting an inevitable blow. “Don’t, Yamato Hotsuin,” Alcor had said, and at the time it was one more thing to enrage him, that Alcor though he had any right to ask anything more of Yamato or his clan.

Now, he saw that Alcor had been _afraid_. Would he have begged if he was human enough to know how, or delude himself into thinking it would work? Alcor had been afraid that when Hiro knew he would reject him, even though Yamato had said it only seconds ago: it was _obvious_ what Alcor was.

Yes, it was so obvious he almost wanted to laugh. Of _course_ the one Yamato considered worthy to stand by his side must have known, must have counted on it. There had been absolutely no surprise on Hiro’s face, and it wasn’t just a matter of keeping calm so those others wouldn’t panic and fall apart. He’d asked Alcor if it was true just to hear his response, and so that the others would hear it.

When Hiro told him that it was okay, Alcor had been just as shocked as Yamato was. Shocked and grateful.

Magnificent, magnificent Hiro. “He used him. He used him to create the new world he wanted,” Yamato belatedly realized. Just like Hiro managed to turn the rabble JPs acquired into their most effective team. The being that had set Yamato’s clan on this path, whose actions were responsible for everything, had been reduced to someone else’s tool, just like Yamato had spent far too much of his life.

His last life.

“I used the Shomonkai, and Hiro’s older brother used me. I didn’t figure out until the end that he’d made me use him for exactly what he’d wanted to do all along,” Naoya reminisced. “Hiro is still in second place: he’s only gotten an island out of it, while his brother used me and our grandfather to get his hands on a kingdom.” There was far more pride than even token resentment in his voice. “If you still want to make this Saiduq suffer a little, I suggest you stay out here until Hiro finds you and try to catch a cold. According to Atsuro, he’s sitting alone in a dark room worrying about how you’re alone and possibly dying of exposure because of him.”

Yamato was used to defending his pride, declaring that he didn’t care what others thought and couldn’t be pushed around for the likes of them, but if this was true, he would have to figure out how to look pitiful. It might just be worth it. “So this is why they didn’t want me to make contact with you.”

“Well, that and the way I helped the Shomonkai tap the power of demons and kill your predecessor,” Naoya said with an answering smirk. “Now,” unless you need any more lessons in ‘trusting your friends’ or ‘manipulation for dummies,’ “I have a garden to rewire.”


	4. Chapter 4

Fortunately for Yamato, even though Hiro hadn’t let Ronaldo come with him to fight Yamato and get to have the satisfaction of breaking that nose, by the time Hiro found him and brought him back Abel had brought Airi’s dad to the island.

“I missed one? I was certain I’d had them all killed.” Damn. Not only had he lied to Hiro without being aware of it, now Yamato felt both boastful and incompetent. This would be remedied. If he went back to JPs. Or JPs was still top secret, for that matter.

Yamato was also rather lucky Ronaldo was too shocked to hear what Yamato said when he saw them. Airi was still yelling at her father and his mentor, only refraining from hitting him because that would have required letting go of him with even a single arm. Ronaldo had already run out of ways to say, “What the hell? Why didn’t you trust me to know that you were alive? Do you know what I did because of you?” in Japanese and both Spanish and Portuguese words were slipping into his combination interrogation and diatribe.

* * *

Since the best man planned the bachelor party he also had to attend the bachelor party, and no one had succeeded in convincing Abel or Atsuro to transport strippers to the island. Still, no one saw a problem with letting the teenagers have a  _little_ sake, after all they’ve been through. Sure, Kaido would start egging them on, and Joe might help until he and Abel started singing (Abel didn’t wear his headphones all the time just for looks), but Naoya would be there, and Hiro was glumly certain that not only would he not drink, because then he might do something showy, violate his parole and get kicked off the planet before the wedding, but that he would never, ever let Hiro forget anything stupid he did while drunk.

Daichi was so excited to be drinking for the first time that he joined Joe, Gin and Abel in singing old American rock without even a karaoke machine. Hiro didn’t have enough money to put down a deposit on one that would be on _sand_ and might get wrecked, even if the JSDF naval vessels that arrived with Izuna had offered to supply whatever they needed both for diplomatic reasons and because this was the second time his family saved the world and they liked to encourage that sort of thing. Since the world was still calming down from the panic caused by the shared mass hallucination, though, the JSDF had too much food to transport after all the panic-buying and other urgent tasks for Hiro to feel alright about asking them to rush him a karaoke machine. He knew better than to ask for his brothers’ help: Abel’s opinion of the karaoke versions of most songs consisted of words he wouldn’t say in front of his baby brother lest he face the disappointment of their mother, and Naoya thought the entire concept was ridiculous. How hard was it to remember a song?

Still, they had the barbecue pit on the beach, and torches. The sound of the sea after a week in a bubble. The taste of a fresh fish roasted on a stick jammed into the sand next to that fire, and later they could dig roasted potatoes out of the coals.

“Your cousin and Saiduq are bonding over when beer was something you could eat with chopsticks like tofu,” Yamato told him, sitting back down by the fireside after fetching a bottle of water.

Hiro laughed. “I asked him once if he was really so old he was around when dinosaurs roamed the earth, and he said yes, and so was everyone else: we just call them birds,” he told Yamato while the quartet finished singing about a lady climbing a stairway and started excitedly simultaneously saying what they should totally sing next.

Keisuke was just sitting back and watching the show, although he knew that it wouldn’t take long for them to drag him in the way Midori did.

“The okonomiyaki was good, but that is terrible,” Yamato said, indicating the sake bottle Gin had picked out for them to try, saying nothing was too good for Abel’s kid brother.

“Abel says it’s like coffee: eventually you get used to it, and not everything’s supposed to taste good, just like life shouldn’t be all fun and games. Yuzu said she likes chocolate because it’s sweet, but no matter how much milk there is in it, there’s still a bit of bitterness that reminds her of how good the sweetness really is. But,” Hiro said, leaning back on his hands and looking up at the sky, wishing he knew more about how to find the Big Dipper than that it had sort of a P shape, “I don’t like it either.”

“Hmm.” Perhaps that had some truth to it, but, “Aren’t they foolish enough without taking something to make them even more foolish?” If only there was a drink that made people smarter. If he ever found a way to overwrite Saiduq’s world, Yamato made a mental note to include something like that.

“Back before they knew about germs, it was less foolish than drinking the water,” Hiro reminded him.

That Yamato also had to agree with. Water purification in case of a more subtle terrorist attack than the Shomonkai assault was one of the things that crossed his desk. “I _did_ eventually learn to tolerate broccoli.” Although part of the solution was applying the right cooking method and the other was confirming the nutritional benefits of broccoli himself, since his minders were idiots. He still drank from the water bottle instead of his sake cup, but according to the instructions Gin gave them beforehand, consuming alcohol caused dehydration, so administering it along with plenty of water was the way to avoid unpleasant side effects like hangovers. He wondered if his personnel had simply never bothered to listen to the advice of an expert or they were too stupid to follow their advice. Likely both.

“The burn as it went down my throat: I didn’t like it before, but now it made me think of the burn from curry-You have had curry, right?”

“Yes.” He hated blandness and prided himself on his ability to eat things that would send his minders desperately reaching for their water glasses even though, or especially because, that wouldn’t help them. “Your brother’s bartender friend also said it was used for contests, wasn’t it? Tests of fortitude. Don’t worry, I have no intention of poisoning myself, but it might be useful to know how much of this I could consume and still act intelligently.” Preferably while everyone around him was too drunk to do anything but agree to whatever he proposed.

“You’re on,” Hiro told him with a grin.

* * *

“To the bride!” Midori declared, the pink-clad sentai heroine jumping to her feet.

“The bride!”

It was thanks to Midori’s insistence that Abel help her bring _all_ her cosplay outfits and deft hand with a needle that they had dresses for the bride and her bridesmaids. It was her idea to make the bachelorette party a costume party.

Joe’s friends were all such odd people, more than a little overwhelming after spending so long in a hospital bed, but so kind. The priestess Kuzuryu hadn’t just offered to perform the ceremony herself, but she’d helped write the wedding vows, after a death glare at that man who said to ignore her, the first thing they should write was a prenuptial agreement. From the way he laughed, he clearly wasn’t suggesting that for either her or Joe’s benefit.

“Just ignore him,” Yuzu told her later, rolling her eyes at the behavior of her husband’s boss and her friend’s older brother. “We’re still not sure if Naoya’s just trying to get under Amane’s skin or her clothes, too.” The flash of a conspiratorial grin took the edge off how rude it was to say something like that: they were all family here, and this was just teasing. But if Naoya really was attracted to Amane, Yuzu would… agree with Amane that she shouldn’t even consider it, because what he really liked was driving her insane.

Dr. Otome giggled, so she did too, even if hers was a little more nervous. Dr. Otome’s adopted daughter had already become the ringleader of Yuzu’s much younger children, once she was sure that her new mother wasn’t just trying to avoid her again.

Half the people here were treating this as a family reunion: the other half were still reeling from the shock of either watching the world vanish around them, and themselves with it, or  watching it fall apart around them as hungry people with the power to summon demons became desperate.

“To little Hiro-chan!” the motherly nurse Mari toasted next, the wooden stakes tied to the belt she wore around the white leather coat that made her look like some kind of cyberpunk vampire hunter clattering as she moved.

“I’ll drink two to that,” declared the JSDF officer who showed up to the party in her old uniform, the one she’d worn while fighting alongside Hiro’s brother during the lockdown. Smiling nostalgically, she said, “He takes after his brother.”

“Which one?” Fumi asked, smiling to herself. Personally, now that she’d met Naoya, she understood where the kid got it from.

Next to her, Jane joined in the laughter. The only member of the family Fumi stayed with as an exchange student who could make it, she seemed more relaxed the more personal and possibly insulting the conversation grew. Well, that was what she was familiar with: it was only efficient for a country home to people whose cultures had so many different codes of conduct to give up trying to standardize what signals were and were not meant to cause offense and focus on honest display of emotion.

Most people wouldn’t have thought Fumi was the type to like being grabbed and hugged in public. She wouldn’t have thought that of herself either, but she’d let Jane put an arm over her shoulder and was willing to lean on her, even though her face showed her same aloof and somewhat predatory smile.

“Did you ladies call for some entertainment?” they heard someone say before a man in a sharply-cut purple suit appeared next to the fire, taking a bow that was clearly meant to show himself off even though he aimed it towards the bride so it suggested that this was in her honor.

Yuzu and Haru doubled over laughing, leaning against each other instead of falling back onto the sand, while Amane gave him a regally unamused look that was only more effective coming from an Egyptian queen. “Naoya put you up to this, didn’t he?”

“You wound me!” He put his hand over his heart.

Amane’s silence said clear as day that she hadn’t yet, but if he was offering…

“Lovely priestess, I have never needed anyone’s help to find a party. Especially not one with a fire in my honor.”

“Let him stay, he’s one of Gin’s best customers!” Haru reached across Yuzu and the bride to poke Amane. “And if Naoya was involved, this way it’ll backfire.”

“Yes!” Midori punched the air. “Let’s get you changed!” she said, and dragged Loki into a changing room. The small shacks for people to change into swimsuits were crowded with too people, but neither of them were the type to mind that.

As long as it’s not into a horse, Loki thought. He sacrifices his dignity and well-being to help Odin, and not only does Odin repay his sworn, eternal friendship by having snake venom drip on him eternally after one joke of a sort that was apparently just fine if it was _Odin’s_ idea, but it had become a _joke_. Loki was more than able to handle anyone who dared to mock him, he just worried about poor little Slepnir.

“Hinako!” Airi demanded. “Dance for us!” Before Midori finished with the stripper, otherwise they might not appreciate her performance as much!

Alhough the contrast between Hinako’s usual clothing and what she was doing just made the refined elegance of her dance stand out even more, it was still amazing to see her dance in quasi-traditional clothing, Airi thought.

Even the demon, happily chatting with Midori about her business and the art of being sexy enough to seduce anyone or anything, stopped dead in his tracks when he saw her.

Well, thought Loki, that’s what happens when I decide to put down roots somewhere in order to watch Naoya’s ongoing efforts to pretend to be a normal child, then teen, then genius programmer working to overcome God’s ordeal. He’d have to find out which of his many adoring customers was both determined enough to have a permanent piece of him to consider having his child, and creepy enough to do it without telling him. Because being so adored meant there were quite a few in that category. On the one hand, it was somewhat disturbing, but on the other he _did_ adore his children.

One of these days, he was going to make Naoya crack. The trouble was that the original humans had been created without lust, since they weren’t intended to reproduce by sex at all, but by more divine creation once they were made immortal and ascended as God’s equals. Adam and Eve had just done it (once they knew it existed) because it was fun and a way for their shared spirit to be connected again. Even after God cursed them to bear children like the beasts, the first time Naoya was given the talk was after helplessly watching his mother’s torturous second childbirth, a screaming ordeal neither she nor Abel would have survived if it weren’t for Gabriel. No amount of fun was worth doing _that_ to someone, and Naoya had also been crafted a soulmate: he’d been too outraged at the idea that he should breed with Abel’s and Abel with his to then decide to join with random strangers. By this point it was a matter of both principle and millennia-old habit, and very few could out-stubborn Naoya.

It wasn’t until Seth that God had done his best to override the free will humans possessed and make it _imperative_ that they reproduce, inflicting the sin of lust upon them.

Since sexuality wasn’t a concept either when Naoya was born (it wasn’t as though homosexuality wasn’t common among the animals, since separate types hadn’t even occurred to God until he decided to make something to babysit Adam: it was evolution that made them become more likely to be attracted to the mates that would produce children) that was no barrier.  Naoya did have a soulmate, but since God had decided to give it to Abel and then to Seth, after Abel died and couldn’t sire children, it didn’t reincarnate with him and the millennia had done a good job stamping out Naoya’s faith in any sort of happy reunion.

Loki _did_ have to admire the wording Remiel used to make Amane think, and tell the real Abel (who knew better) that there were plenty of other candidates (so he’d better not think he was anything special). There _were_ multiple Abels, technically. It wasn’t a lie. Two of them: Abel himself and the one made from his rib.

Still, if Naoya was geared to be attracted to anything, it was those similar to himself. Since they had so much in common, like issues with God, Lucifer would have had the best shot at relieving the eldest son of the Creator’s human son of his virginity if Naoya didn’t still hold a grudge for how Lucifer tricked his mother into thinking God wanted her and Adam to eat from the tree. Lucifer would have to talk fast, faster than Naoya could blast him with holy magic.

Loki could have _sworn_ that Naoya was flirting with Amane on a few occasions, and they did have stubborn dedication in common, but it was their differences that made them so volatile and if Adam had been wired to be attracted to difference, he would have slept with all those adoring animals first instead of his other half.

Perhaps the flirting was just Loki’s trickster nature (and ability to annoy just about anyone into making just the mistakes Loki wanted them to) rubbing off on Naoya.

Little did Loki know that Naoya was far from innocent. He couldn’t farm, couldn’t hunt and refused to join any sort of priesthood except as a consultant, like the terms he’d worked for the Shomonkai under. What he could do was master any skilled craft under the sun, but once things got more ‘civilized’ families often established monopolies that eventually grew into guilds. In the days before things like codes of law, and even after, they rarely had a problem with things like smashing the hands of someone who didn’t heed their warnings so they couldn’t pursue _any_ trade. The other half of the Mark placed upon him was protection: anyone who harmed his grandson would be struck down by God, but that was after the fact.

 Not to mention that while some cultures, like the Greeks and sometimes China, encouraged their geniuses no matter who they’d been born to, others, including China often enough, didn’t think very highly of those who were too smart and didn’t show the proper respect for tradition and the people who used it to stay in power. Since taxation before money often involved labor on public works (like irrigation ditches…) or everyone had to help during planting season, Naoya had a choice between angering the community by shirking his work or having everything he touched die and angering the community by clearly being accursed, a curse that was destroying _their_ food. The multiplicity of languages didn’t help either: yes, he learned how to learn them, but they mutated so fast once the common tongue was lost that he could no longer somewhat easily move to the tribe or city over the next hill and learn how to act like one of them anywhere near quickly enough.

When Naoya ended up in a situation where he just couldn’t win, he learned soon enough to shrug and move on to the next life, but Abel would always reincarnate close to him the next time Abel’s own incarnation died. Life and death being what they were back then, it was all too easy for Abel to become an orphan beggar, or be sold into slavery by his own parents thanks to poverty or being too attractive for his own good (the two of them were always handsome: the divine aura clinging to them made sure of that no matter how scarred Naoya became, for example), or be crippled, or a host of other unpleasant things, blessing or no blessing. Terrible things happened often enough before technology that being protected from ninety percent of them (neither Abel nor Naoya had ever died of childhood diseases, for example, unlike so many of their peers in each life) just made Abel likely to live long enough to fall prey to human evil.

Early on, Naoya had tried to look after Abel just because Abel was his brother, then in hopes of getting Grandfather’s forgiveness even though he _knew_ how delusional that thought was and then because he was the only familiar thing in a hellish world. He often envied the others around him, who didn’t know how much of a horror human existence truly was because they didn’t know how it was _supposed_ to be.

In many lives Naoya had only one anchor, only one thing to prove that his memories weren’t born of madness. Or to keep him from retreating into madness. Breaking the curse and revenge on Grandfather gave him a reason to go on: Abel gave him a rock to stand on.

Perhaps there was more than a little vengeance in keeping him alive, too. Naoya killed Abel _once_. Grandfather’s cruelty to humanity, the curses he laid on them had killed his supposedly-beloved grandson _hundreds_ of times.

Well, who had Abel chosen to protect, in the end?

Before and after Abel began to be reborn with his memories, Naoya had done things to protect him that Naoya never would have done for his own sake.

Naoya had nothing else, nothing he could keep.

Yuzu was the first to figure that out, after Abel finally told her that he’d been _trying_ , since long ago when Naoya warned him his friend had a crush, and she was one of his best friends and he did love her, but he couldn’t love her the way she wanted. She wasn’t the other half of his soul, she was her own person, and he couldn’t reduce her to just an extension of himself. Not when he wanted her to have someone who loved her for _her_.

Of course, she couldn’t let him give up like that, after everything they’d been through, so she’d told him that sometimes people just didn’t fall in love, that was fine and not his _fault_ , and he shouldn’t feel _obligated_ to try to fall in love with her, it wasn’t like it was going to be the end of her world. Especially since she had already noticed he was more interested in Haru, and she’d thought _that_ was why he had a ‘trying to let you down gently’ look in his eyes, for crying out loud.

If anything, she was disappointed that he hadn’t called her over to the Tokyo U dorms to tell her that he and Haru had started dating.

It was a lot easier not to feel intimidated by the fact she knew a couple mythological figures with hundreds of years of knowledge and smarts when they were both such _boys_.

“Honestly, Joe’s kind of a goof,” Airi was telling the bride as Yuzu remembered the past and what led up to her own bachelorette party. “I mean, really a goof.”

“I know. He didn’t visit me for months because he felt bad about letting it go so long. I can walk around now, though. If that happens again, I’ll just track him down and tie him up!” the bride declared happily,

“I’ll drink to that!” Airi said, fitting actions to words. Only she meant her dad, not a boyfriend. Although she might need to do that to a boyfriend someday. Like, take Keita. Not that she wanted to.

“To bondage!” Midori happily agreed.

“To bondage!” A throaty voice agreed from behind them as a woman dressed as a belly dancer sashayed up to them. No, it wasn’t quite a belly dance costume, Hinako knew, although she couldn’t recall the name of the dance that involved a snake.

…that wasn’t a prop.

“Aunt Lily!” Yuzu put her glass down and leaped up, overjoyed. “You made it!” They weren’t sure she’d be able to: the news that the human world had fallen, and to someone else, obviously made the demons restive. Since the King of Bel was up here with his family, his Aunt Lilith had offered to …handle anyone who made trouble while he was gone.

In the process of feeding them to her dear serpent.

“So I take it the odds of a demon rebellion and invasion are back to normal?” Izuna asked her, orange eyes sharp. Red hair happened, but orange eyes were a little too close to red. She’d worn contacts up until she joined the military, where they became an advantage.

A shrug that caused certain movements and a throaty chuckle were the only responses, so Izuna decided not to press her luck. Lilith was created to control a young godling and keep him from, for example, jumping out of trees due to forgetting that he couldn’t fly again. Mind control was first nature to her, even if it originally manifested as adoration instead of lust, according to one of Naoya’s occasional tidbits of tactical information. Since all modern humans were part-demon (and hadn’t _that_ upset everyone cleared to know it), they didn’t have the amount of resistance Adam and the first generation did. Except for Seth, for some reason: she could tell Naoya hadn’t meant to mention that.

Well, this was going to be an interesting party, in the curse word sense of interesting. Lilith was temptation incarnate, and Izuna’s previous experience with and research on Loki indicated that he was a man-whore even when he wasn’t a man.

And she’d still rather be here, with incredibly powerful non-human entities, than dealing with her superiors. It was more than a little scary how well she fit in here, how her hair and eyes didn’t seem odd at all either among Abel’s allies or Seth’s.

Almost as terrifying, even for someone with both a machine gun and demons to call on, someone who had gone inside the Lockdown even knowing it was a death sentence, someone who had stood her ground and died defending a fifth of what was left of her country’s soil, of her world’s, as the idea that _Naoya_ , of all people, was human and everyone else wasn’t. Not quite. When it was so easy to go through any city, even in insular Japan, and find people clearly marked by the inhuman. Because the ‘normal’ people weren’t normal either, traces in their genes that just hadn’t risen to the surface. Yet.

She let out a sigh blended between contentment, resignation and just plain tired.

“Warrior dances _are_ dedicated to Odin, but since the lady is a friend of our king, I’ll make an exception,” Loki told them as Hinako finally stepped aside, and he took her place across the fire from the half-circle of watchers, the moonlit ocean at his back.

Amane said nothing, but frowned at herself to find that she was a little disappointed Loki wasn’t stripping. She could have used that to send them away, since Airi and the other minors hadn’t fallen asleep yet.

Long after they had fallen asleep, carried to bed by Otome & other parents, and Amane, among others, had left early so they could get up early and prepare for tomorrow, happy voices echoed off the dunes until -

 “-Someone cast Amrita!”

Yuzu knelt by the bride’s other side, casting the spell that had cost her children so many sick days. They’d almost cheered when after reading an article she decided that she should let them get sick: they wouldn’t be living with her forever and their immune systems needed the workout. “Diarahan isn’t working either,” she said as Dr. Otome and Nurse Mari joined her.

“She’s passed out?” Mari still possessed that serene tone that could make people think she was either stoned or utterly disaffected with the world even when she was hunting down the vampire that killed her fiancé.

“How many has she had, anyway?” Yuzu belatedly realized. “Was anyone keeping track?”

“I’m not sure she was,” Dr. Otome told her, short blonde hair falling forward as she shook her head, leaning over the patient. “She’s been in that hospital for a long time, and before that…”

“Should I call a speedboat to get her over to one of our shipboard infirmaries?” Izuna offered, hand on her radio.

Yuzu hesitated. After so long in the hospital, to wake up there?

“Surprisingly, I don’t have any spells to deal with drunkenness,” Loki said: glancing at Lilith, he saw she didn’t either. “The Norse saw it as a state to achieve, not end early. Naoya might: he has an affinity for holy magic and more knowledge of the human body than we do.” The ‘biochemistry’ of it all.

“I’ll get him,” Yuzu said, since she didn’t have any formal medical training, Naoya was more likely to listen to her than anyone else here and she wanted to see if the bachelor party had gotten its hands on any strippers. It wasn’t that she worried about Atsuro – he could program himself better 3d pornography if he ever wanted it – but they had children over there. And Kaido had contacts who specialized in smuggling things in past blockades.

Running down the path, she certainly wasn’t going to stop but she smelled the flowers anyway. The night wind carried a jasmine-sweet fragrance and dozens of others she didn’t know. What a place for a wedding. Or a honeymoon.

Joe was the first to catch sight of her: he and Ronaldo were by the bonfire trying to maneuver Hiro, who had hair-trigger reflexes after what he’d just been through, and Yamato, who had actual anti-assassination training, into a compromising position without waking them, Joe for the amusement and Ronaldo because guilty of a certain specific murder or not, Yamato was still a little bastard. “Hi, uh-“

“Yuzu,” Gin told him, sitting by the baskets of drinks and the other old man with the white-and-pink hair, which was strange even by their standards. “What happened?”

“Someone passed out,” she said, trying to pretend that she was just annoyed instead of worried, and that it was a nebulous ‘someone’ instead of the woman Hiro’s friend Joe loved. “Loki thought Naoya might know a spell for that.”

“He’s over there,” Gin said, looking concerned as he pointed off into the shadows.

Blinking her eyes to adjust after looking in the area lit by the flames, Yuzu saw Naoya, Atsuro and the boy in the absolutely _terrible_ red-and-black striped… thing with the white ruffles inside the collar. Honestly, the first time she saw him, between his skinny pallor and what he was wearing she knew he could only be one of two things. A, not human, or B, a fashion model. “Thanks,” she said, and loped over to them over the soft sands.

“Look, if we’re talking a database that contains all information, we start to run into the one-to-one scale map problem, right?” she heard Atsuro say, sketching. “ _Forget_ the Incompleteness Theorem in all its forms.”

“That’s one problem I encountered. As an Akashic being, my personal memory was part of the archive itself, so I couldn’t possess any data that conflicted. And as for the imponderables! Humans consider the Akashic Records the total knowledge of their own species, but even though the human brain itself is what you call a computer-” Saiduq said, and if Yuzu hadn’t known he wasn’t originally a demon she would have been a little worried. Could demons learn to write their own summoning programs? Saiduq had, after all.

“There are the perception problems,” Naoya agreed. “Even my Grandfather has a massive blind spot, it’s not possible to take in data or perceive anything without one.” He was smiling, eyes bright with interest, in a way that wouldn’t have seemed wicked if this was anyone but Naoya, who looked that way even when he wasn’t plotting anything but heirloom tomatoes. “Since humans are by definition incapable of perfect understanding of themselves or other humans, their connection to the Akashic Records made you and Polaris unable to understand them.”

“Oh hey, Yuzu,” Atsuro said before Saiduq replied. “Worried about me?”

“Of course not. You’d forget your hat if it wasn’t glued to your head, but you wouldn’t leave your comp behind,” Yuzu said, then got down to business. “Naoya? Do you know anything about alcohol poisoning?”

He gave her that look which asked her who she thought she was talking to. Forget alchemy, the real birthplace of chemistry was drink-making and distillery. “A _lot_. What happened?”

“I think I assumed someone knew her limit when she’d actually never drunk before.” So had everyone else, but if Yuzu had thought to ask that still would have prevented this.

“I’ll be back,” he told the other two.

“Right,” Atsuro said, and turned back to Saiduq. “So…” Since they should pick up the advanced theory discussions when Naoya got back, what did Atsuro want to ask a truly alien being? Hmm…


	5. Chapter 5

Naoya’s haori flared out behind him even when there was barely any wind: on a night like tonight he looked impossibly dramatic, Yuzu saw out of the corner of her eye as he ran beside her. And how could he run like that in those sandals?

Practice. Right. Behind his disaffected air Naoya was as curious as Atsuro: he wanted to learn _everything_ , so no wonder he’d picked up so much stuff. “What are you so happy about?” she asked him, a little wary because she did know him, after all.

“He has an instinctive understanding of logic and he already studied computer science to design his program to be compatible with all cell phone operating systems, even personalized ones,” Naoya grinned. “Atsuro thinks he’s the closest thing we’ve encountered to an alien: I think he’s the closest thing we’ve encountered to a human-system-born artificial intelligence. What’s truly interesting is that he’s definitely not descended from meme-viruses: change-over-time as we understand it, let alone evolution, simply isn’t _possible_ in a system like that. His opinion of humans became different from that of his brethren because of interaction with humans causing them to literally _change his mind_ for him… Ah, yes.”

She wasn’t her husband, even if she knew more than most after so much time around him, Abel and Naoya himself. “Do you have any idea how much it would have speeded up the development process of creating my universal language-based summoning program if Aya knew the first thing about basic logic? Alcor has an instinctive understanding of the logical principles behind computer science. Which is one of many reasons his kind aren’t capable of understanding humans. Imponderables: the word means things that cannot be thought about, but humans have to calculate dozens of them just to decide what to wear. Doctrine teaches that Grandfather is unknowable, and that is technically true, yet he came into existence by observing himself.” The I Am.

“We’ve inherited that ability to understand things that cannot be understood. Imperfectly, of course, but enough to be able to work with them. Unfortunately, most humans use this ability to ‘know’ things without thinking about them first to avoid thinking altogether.” So embarrassing. “But the human attempt to construct a system that actually works logically from first principles has given us a rosetta stone, since unlike normal human thought patterns he’s capable of understanding it even though he is, or he _was_ a being of pure static data. Pure _genius_ on his part, to learn it as a stepping stone to understanding humans and also to make use of it in his hope we could save ourselves, since he couldn’t alter reality that way. And for an entity with such barriers to producing new ideas to think of this? I may actually have found someone who will remain worth working with for more than forty years.” Damn senility, one more ill that never should have befallen the human race. As those around him gained enough knowledge to think meaningful thoughts, their ability to think began to decay.

And that, Yuzu thought as she rolled her eyes, was Naoya’s idea of the simple version. She should warn Abel and Hiro that Naoya had found a shiny new toy. “And you’re _happy_ about that? I thought you were proud of being smarter than the rest of us.”

“There are different types of intelligence,” he reminded her. “My apprentice has genius-level inductive reasoning, but very little common sense. You, on the other hand, have genius-level common sense.”

“Thanks?” She was pretty sure that wasn’t a compliment.

“It’s why you knew the best way for your friends to survive was to get out of there. Your willingness to ignore the larger implications and the consequences to other people when it comes to those you care for is why I selected you as one of my brother’s friends.” Yuzu had known that leaving would fuck the world, she wasn’t a fool, but staying meant exposing Atsuro and especially Abel to an insane amount of danger. Fighting heaven? Conquering the world and therefore pissing the world off? Fighting Babel and whatever else the Shomonkai had to fling at them? Naoya knew his plan had been insane from the beginning: he’d counted on Yuzu to recognize this and make sure Abel was reminded of this instead of racing headlong into everything without taking proper precautions.

“Ah, so you were complimenting my ruthlessness.” So it was an actual compliment, just not something she would have considered a compliment. Not until she became a mother, anyway.

“Of course.” But, to return to the original subject, “Al Saiduq is intelligent in a useful way, but it’s easy to prey upon his sympathies and manipulate him.” Such a glaring weakness made him absolutely no threat to Naoya. “Rather like your husband, but even more so. If it weren’t for the fact that Hiro already secured his undying loyalty, I would forge adoption papers first thing tomorrow morning.” Hmm. “I may still do that, if no one has any better ideas for giving him a cover identity.”

Yeeeah. “You know,” she said, still not out of breath even though she’d been running all this time and they were almost there, “All my other friends ask me how I’ve managed to stay the same size I was in high school. There’s nothing like a demonic invasion to teach you the importance of getting as much sleep as you need, small meals that don’t weigh you down but don’t leave you hungry either and plenty of cardio.”

He laughed as he kicked off his sandals just before they stepped out onto the sands. “See? Common sense.”

It didn’t take long for him to make his diagnosis. “Keep an eye on her. Unless her condition changes, she won’t lose any brain cells she was using.”

Yuzu tried asking, “Don’t you have any ancient remedies, or…”

“Nothing that isn’t extinct, and forcing her to swallow isn’t a good idea with the alcohol interfering with those reflexes to begin with.” Damn goats, they’d root everything edible out until there was nothing to feed the soil and grassland became desert. Abel favored them: in hindsight, that probably was because they were ornery and determined to live no matter what, but Abel had the brains to move them around, make sure they didn’t stay in any one area long enough to eat everything there that wasn’t them. “She’s already got the best remedy there is for this level. It’s a good thing she passed out before she drank any more.”

Naoya would have been a medicine man far more often if doing a decent job of it wouldn’t have required growing his own herbs, those he knew worked, instead of relying on local remedies. He still knew the purposes of all the plants as well as the names of all the animals, as little good as the second did him when he couldn’t speak to them the way his parents could.

“I have to agree,” Dr. Otome admitted. “She’ll have a hangover, but her breathing’s fine, she hasn’t attempted to throw up…”

“And she’ll know better next time,” Mari agreed, calm distraction hiding the ruthless practicality of someone who dealt with high schoolers (these days) and their stupid, stupid experimenting for a living. Having a hangover on her wedding day was so much better than dying. All that struggle to stay alive, the miracle this woman was given that so many others wouldn’t receive, and she’d nearly lost it through carelessness. Mari didn’t have any more sympathy for this woman than she was going to have for Kaido tomorrow. Not when the application of plenty of light and noise would keep her husband alive longer than cooing over him.

Naoya gave her a slightly surprised look, then laughed, sounding slightly honestly delighted. “Abel makes the most interesting friends.” He should know Mari better than this by now, when she’d let a demon possess her so she could kill her soon-to-be-fiancé’s murderer with her own bare hands.

“And I have a daughter to think about,” Dr. Otome said. Showing was so much better than telling, after all.

“Alright, but _you’re_ responsible for her,” Yuzu told Naoya.

“Or I’ll have to walk down the aisle in her place? Agreed,” Naoya said with a perfectly straight face.

“Like the Best Man?” Fumi asked, interested.

Yuzu might have said, ‘You’re pretty confident,’ if this wasn’t Naoya. “Or I’ll hand you over to Midori for photo shoots.”

Naoya could have responded to that with ‘you and what army?’ but not only was that cliché, “If I was wrong about so common a diagnosis, I’d deserve it.”

“Right you are.” Yuzu glanced around. “Alright, show’s over.”

“I’m up for dancing again,” Hinako suggested.

Airi wasn’t the only one that cheered.

“The traditional fan dance,” Naoya said quietly as Dr. Otome passed him a sake cup. “The base of the fan symbolizes birth, and the ribs symbolize the many paths that person’s life can follow, depending on what choices they make. Surprisingly appropriate. She isn’t another miko, is she?” he asked Airi, who seemed to know her.

“No, she just wants to dance.”

“Hmm,” he said thoughtfully (and menacingly, for those who knew him or were starting to know him) as he handed his cup towards the blonde woman for her to refill it. He’d barely drunk anything at all in order to keep his mind sharp for such an interesting interroga- _discussion_ with Alcor, but he was fond of alcohol, at least decent alcohol. There were more than enough times in his lives when he’d been glad of a little brain damage. 

“She used mostly physical techniques, didn’t she?” he mused.

“Yes,” Otome said, wondering how he had guessed.

“They would have come easily to her, with trained strength and coordination.” Of course. “Hmm.” Well, she _had_ assisted one of his little brothers, he supposed. He could show her how it was done. And the Japanese government would just have to put up with it. “You.” Glasses-girl. “Let me see your fans.”

Midori perked up at that. Naoya _did_ have a flair for costuming. The green on his black kimono was made up of raining ones and zeroes: life called forth from the machine? Green, plant life when he was cursed with a black thumb? Not to mention the _wooden_ sandals. In hindsight, he might as well have been giving Heaven the finger. He made _such_ a good villain, too.

After Hinako’s final bow was met with thunderous applause, Naoya stepped forward. “Summoning rituals consist of precise angles, circles and ratios which can be rapidly constructed by computer. The skill crack system is also ritual-based, this time on the ritual sacrifice of demons,” and humans, “to obtain a portion of their power. Similarly, setting those stored demonic power summoning constructs to specific individuals causes the application to constantly generate a ritual that would allow for instant summoning of that spell by that individual at the desired target whenever it is activated.

“Before computers, the invention of paper allowed the creation of seals that would activate a preset spell when applied to the target, but once one ran out of seals, one was out of spells, and they could only safely contain so much power” and paper was bloody expensive, the things took forever to draw and once his eyes decayed to the point he would have needed reading glasses if they were available it wasn’t safe to make them anymore, since one screw-up meant painful death.

“That left three types of reliable war magic: blessings to increase speed, strength and durability which could be cast ahead of time, curses to weaken one’s enemies which could also be cast ahead of time, and spells with a dramatic enough effect that it was worth covering the sorcerer while they completed the ritual, which had to be done with speed, precision and a minimum of materials,” which would have to be carried onto the battlefield and protected. “Absolute concentration was key, always hard when people are trying to kill you, and perfect execution of the ritual. Therefore, combat sorcerers had to practice those rituals until they could be done automatically while in a trance-like state of utmost concentration.” Since ‘body memory’ was really just training the brain, which controlled those movements, he didn’t have to learn them all over again every life, thank goodness. “Those spells took two main forms: chants, often using premade talismans as foci, and dance.” The first two fans he’d borrowed snapped open on the final word. “The ritual dance you just saw Miss Hinako perform was originally designed as a blessing meant to ensure health, happiness and welfare. The five spells I am about to perform are earlier versions of those some of you,” Yuzu, Midori, Hiro’s friends, “have seen or even used before, cast by computer. First, the Fire Dance.”

Was he seriously going to violate the terms of his parole not only in front of her, but whoever was watching this from the vessels guarding the island? This was Naoya, so Izuna knew that yes, he was. He’d been on good behavior for so long because it wasn’t worth the bother not to be, but now there was more proof that the world needed his family and the rules about demon summoning were ultimately the ones they made and enforced. She lifted up her radio and brought it to her mouth. “Heads up, fireworks on the beach. Do not respond, I repeat, do not respond.”

“Yes, ma’am,” the watch officer agreed.

She was sure that the instant she turned it off he’d let the other bored sailors, as well as the soldiers who were supposed to learn about spellcasting and what Naoya (and others) might be capable of, know to watch the show.

It took a surprisingly long time for the magic to happen, for someone used to the summoning program. Not that she didn’t prefer Naoya when he wasn’t talking, and he was almost as agile as he’d been back when he was twenty-four, even though now he must be a little past forty. Well, he would know what would happen to his body if he didn’t exercise, now wouldn’t he? When she’d met him, he had an ancient’s mind in a twenty-five-year-old’s body: for once, youth wasn’t being wasted on the young.

When he’d finally drawn enough patterns in the air to write out the spell, or however this worked, she was right: it was fireworks first, blasted up into the air instead of at his audience. First the red-orange they’d seen before, then as the tempo increased the color shaded towards the yellow of the sun, on to a flaring blue-white.

Higher frequencies, hotter flames.

Izuna felt like the only one here that realized he wasn’t just showing off his ability to do showy stuff but his _power_ , at least until her eyes met Yuzu’s. The girl (woman, now) might be Naoya’s friend (even if she might not exactly say so), but her ability to tolerate him was based off of her understanding of what she could expect from him. A lot of stuff she put up with because it was Naoya being Naoya, and if she was going to be bothered by it then she shouldn’t have hung out with him in the first place.

Midori was just clapping excitedly, and who knew what Nurse Mari the yakuza wife thought.

Suddenly he snapped those fans shut, tucked them back into the belt Midori had found for him to tie under his kimono so it could flow around him, and drew out the next two, these patterned with Seiryu instead of Suzaku.

Yes, it took variety to make a successful business out of cosplay performances, custom production and even costuming for theatre troupes and sentai shows, but how much stuff had Midori brought with her?

She’d guessed it: ice was next. At least this one would be harder to see from the ships, so he had a smaller audience to show off to. First snowflakes, then actual ice, forming around him as he circled. Good way to put up a defensive wall: then the enemy wouldn’t be able to see what he was casting or snipe him so easily-why was she evaluating the tactics of this? He’d just use a comp now, cast these spells with the press of a button or a couple of words.

Then he jumped up onto the wall and started circling around it: she was almost surprised he wasn’t skating along, but all it would take to lose control then was one bump. When this one ended he stood on the top of a crystal tower.

Lightning next, multicolored flashes in the cloudless sky above. Explosions of power and sound.

Wind he aimed out at the ocean, so the tornado could suck up the water and be seen more easily. Correction: tornadoes. None of them headed out far enough to threaten the ships, but she wasn’t going to count on that. He was keeping them close enough to hit his own side in a battle, especially since it made sense to keep the sorcerers to the rear. These were anti-personnel weapons, or artillery.

Last, she knew, was his ironic favorite (and probably his favorite for just that reason): Holy Dance. She remembered trying to chase the teleporting bastard around while he threw haywire comps like confetti and started attacking them before they were close enough to hit back. She’d been tempted to pull out her gun and start shooting at him, even though the comp-generated field that meant humans could survive having demon claws rip at their stomachs would have made the ordinary bullets just bounce off. What was left of the JPs ammo stockpile had been issued to the guards at the facility the Diet had retreated to while Tokyo was in Lockdown.

Bastard had just been playing with them, the way he was playing around now. The only one he’d had a real bone to pick with was Amane, Remiel’s host: the demons were just to keep the rest of them busy and his spells, especially those launched at Abel and his two friends, were just intended to make them get out of his way, waste time healing up. Was he doing this to upstage the Hinako girl? Just because he could show her that she would never live long enough to be able to do what he did? No, Izuna was pretty sure casual cruelty wasn’t quite his style: he wouldn’t go out of his way to hurt someone who hadn’t angered him somehow, and Hinako was one of the people who’d helped his little brother.

Hinako also had her jaw dropped, the glitter of the ice reflected in her eyes, or was that the glitter of avarice?

Still, Izuna knew, he wouldn’t go out of his way just to inspire someone either, not unless he got something out of it. What was his game?

Looking around again she saw Yuzu had her arms folded: ah good, at least someone seemed to know. The way she was smiling meant she had a plan to counter his, too.

…Cherry blossoms?

They were a symbol of death, the short and glorious life of a warrior, but still. Why cherry blossoms? As they fell she could detect the scent of green spring, the familiar tingle of dia spells in the air. The clarity of a winter morning, the shocking refreshment of a glass of ice water, the excitement of battle surged through her until she felt so alive it almost hurt…

The tower of ice fell, or rather Naoya did, the tower beneath him vanishing into thick steam that melted away into thin air, into _nothing_ as he earthed the power he’d called into it.

So that was why it was called holy magic, she realized. Healing was returning things to their ideal state, and if both humans and demons were intrinsically flawed beings? They could be purified into nonexistence.

When the air cleared, Naoya stood on the sand, fans extended the way Hinako’s were when she began her dance. And if Izuna noticed that the sand under him was disturbed the way it might have been if Naoya hit the ground rolling, if sharp eyes noticed a bit of sand in his hair… Well, that was half of a successful performance, wasn’t it? If you slipped up, either gloss it over or make them think you’d meant to do that. Maybe it wasn’t even a mistake: Naoya had been a ways up there, and better to take a tumble backstage than try to make an impressive landing and then break his ankle in front of an audience.

He held that pose for an instant more and then shut the last pair of fans, these marked with a golden dragon.

After the clapping, cheers and Midori’s squeals of delight and demands he do a concept shoot for her died away, he went to sit back down next to Yuzu, who handed him a cup of sake.

“Thank you,” he said, accepting it as his due and drinking it thirstily while he looked around for something.

“Amane went to bed hours ago,” Izuna heard Yuzu say.

“But I’m sure she’ll hear all about this tomorrow and try to upstage you then,” Yuzu reassured him as she poured him a refill.

* * *

“What do I always tell you?” Gin asked Kaido as he mixed up two hangover cures, one with each hand. “Mind taking this one up to Keita?”

“Sure,” was Kaido’s monosyllabic reply, and even that made him wince. After Gin’s concoction went down the hatch, he admitted that it was, “My fault for letting him try to keep up with me.”

Between the bartender and the future professional chef, the kitchen area had become the male domain once the women went to go help the bride and all the extra ones were drafted by Amane and Izuna to help gather flowers and see what could be done about the courtyard where they were holding the ceremony after their early breakfast. The priestess already helped Joe and his fiancé write their vows the previous afternoon, while Haru was busy rehearsing.

No fool, Yamato made himself scarce once the conscription started and only come back downstairs after he’d seen most of the women, all of the young children and anyone else who was awake and didn’t have anything better to do head into that godforsaken jungle.

It appeared the others who hadn’t appeared at breakfast also had the same idea or very good timing, unless they’d been woken up by all the hubbub. Ronaldo, who had also helped cook breakfast, was putting dishes away alongside Hiro. Yamato assumed it wasn’t normally this complicated a process, but they had to find where they all went. Still, he was pleased to see that Hiro had escaped conscription, or rather made the intelligent decision to assign himself to a less unpleasant chore.

“How’s your head?” Hiro asked him when he saw Yamato.

“It’s not that,” of course not. “I felt unusually tired. I hope I’m not coming down with something.” After that day in the cold and rain that was entirely Saiduq’s fault. “That would be inconvenient. I can’t expect Izuna and Atsuro to hold them off forever: I’ll need to report as soon as possible.” Delay would be seen as evidence of guilt: Politicians made others wait, they didn’t like to be kept waiting.

Yamato glanced at Naoya to see what he thought about Yamato’s use of his suggestion, but Naoya didn’t move from where he sat on a stool, leaning forward and resting his forehead and upper body on the countertop.

“Never fails,” Gin told him, noticing who he was looking at. “Once he has a few drinks, he forgets that modern drinks contain a lot more alcohol than what people drank for most of the time he’s been around. Even though he knows more about distilling and how to actually make it than I do.” Nothing would replace Aya, but Abel had encouraged him to play that card if he ever wanted something from Naoya: Cain paid his debts, and he had helped the Shomonkai. Learning how to make the best of the beverages the rest of the world had forgotten how to make put Gin’s place on the map. The dark-haired bartender didn’t consider the money all that important, but it was a great opportunity for all the independent artists he knew thanks to Aya. It didn’t hurt that he could pay them a few times their standard gig price. He’d already given Hinako an invitation to come by sometime.

“The bride’s the worst off, though.” Poor girl. “She couldn’t have alcohol before because of her medications, and everyone assumed she knew her own limit and would be careful on the night before her wedding,” Gin said, rolling up his suit sleeves again to wash Kaido’s glass and the bowls and whisk he’d used to make the hangover remedy. He’d ended up giving Joe one of his spare suits as his wedding present. “That’s why Yuzu came by last night and dragged off Naoya in case he knew anything Dr. Otome didn’t.” Even though the two beaches the Bachelor and Bachelorette parties were on were off-limits to little kids and the opposite sex for the duration, once someone passed out they might be looking at the kind of damage Gin wouldn’t stand for on his watch. “You kids were asleep by then.” The combination of alcohol and stuffing themselves full of good old-fashioned beach bonfire food had knocked them all out.

Yamato grimaced at that reminder of his own weakness. He still had sand in his hair. “By the way, where is Alcor?” Now that everyone here was in the know, everyone called Hiro’s brother Abel (although they’d called him that to begin with: it had apparently been his nickname since long before the Lockdown) and no one who knew him seemed bothered by the idea of calling Naoya by the name of Cain. So, if true names were acceptable, Hiro surely wouldn’t mind Yamato calling Al Saiduq what he was. Although Yamato was glad he had monitored his condition well enough to retain his memory of last night.

He would have to learn more about these Pokemon. Everyone’s reaction when Atsuro called Saiduq ‘Psyduck’ was very promising.

Naoya raised a hand to point upwards. “Still on the roof.”

“The roof?” Yamato asked, although he wasn’t that surprised once he thought about it. Alcor was used to looking down on them from above.

Naoya rolled his eyes even though no one could see him do so. “If he knew that being limited to human perceptions would drive him insane, then he shouldn’t have hooked himself up to human sensory data and then scrambled the brain that was making some sense out of all of it. He looks like one of those things on Christmas trees right now. Wrapped in tinsel,” to top it all off. “He’s lucky I was with Izuna and Izuna had her radio with her last night, or he would have gotten hit by a cruise missile while he was up there playing UFO.” Ah, Atsuro. Naoya should have known better than to leave his apprentice alone with a gullible, anxious-to-please real live alien. Or the closest thing to one he’d found so far. In hindsight, Naoya would have been disappointed in Atsuro if he _hadn’t_ taken advantage of the opportunity.

“That wouldn’t have worked,” sadly, Yamato said as he leaned against the white-tiled wall. “Septentriones are immune to conventional weapons.”

Naoya snorted, then regretted it. “Who said anything about conventional weapons?” Just because he’d been the head of one country’s secret project, the boy thought he knew everything? When he was even younger than Hiro? “A missile explosion over our heads would still have been inconvenient. For _us_.” That was the important part.

Hiro gave him a look somewhere between annoyed and resigned that Naoya didn’t see, forehead still pressed against the cool white tile. “He’s worried that if he changes back, he’ll change back into the way he was last night.” His human body buzzed and his actual mind the septentrione, or now demon equivalent of high as a kite. “He wants to stay with his friends, but he’s afraid of losing his mind.”

“If that happens, he’d be a danger to the entire world.” Just like the others. Yamato could use this.

Naoya snorted. “If anyone else had lasted long enough to figure out how to contact you, then the septentriones would have seen why Seth’s descendants are still in control of this realm and Abel took over theirs.” Hiro looked a little odd at that: Naoya hadn’t called him by that name so casually before. “He’s just an ordinary demon now. Powerful, but I can call on a half-dozen just like him _without_ calling in favors.” Loki, Lilith, Gabriel & the other archangels, just off the top of his head. The real threat in demon summoning spreading outside of the lockdown hadn’t been loose demons, but humans using their newfound power to do as they pleased without fear of reprisal, then their victims taking revenge until whatever governments rose from the ashes reminded all their citizens that what they really had to fear was angering other humans, no matter _what_ power they controlled. “What Seth should worry about is the nature of timelessness.”

“Oh?” Yamato asked his friend, who frowned a little.

“I’d already guessed some of this, but Naoya and Fumi agreed this morning that since the Akashic Records were an eternal now, change wasn’t possible.”

“Of course,” Yamato quickly realized. “If the Akashic Records contained all information? One can either know the location of a particle or its velocity.”

That sounded about right, so Hiro nodded. “That’s why he couldn’t overthrow Polaris himself or change things for us, just give us what we needed to try to save ourselves and hope we could change the reality that said we couldn’t win and he couldn’t do anything to save us. Since that wasn’t something that was _possible_ within the… rules about how things worked that he lived in.”

“Remind me to make you read Flatland,” Naoya told him. “It’s difficult for a two-dimensional being to understand the third dimension, and we, unlike him, existed in a truly four-dimensional universe.”

Hiro added that. “He couldn’t change before, but he wanted to: he could because he interacted with people, and those bonds let him change. Now all that effort he put into changing things, including himself, is actually having an effect.” The particle could begin its journey, propelled by all the wound-up force that had moved Al Saiduq to do whatever he could to give others the chance to change, to possess freedom. “And he doesn’t have any idea how to deal with that.” He’d be even more worried once he realized that just staying in demon form wouldn’t stop all these changes from happening to him.

Naoya agreed that, “Instead of another ancient, we have a powerful demon who was born the day before yesterday.” For all practical purposes. Normally, it took time for demons to become that strong, and the ones without intelligence as well would be outwitted and mobbed by their weaker kin. “And is used to letting others decide what he thinks.” Either Polaris or humanity. He did have an opinion of his own, and preferred humanity. The summoning app proved he was capable of creativity and original thought. His separation from Polaris proved he could stand against peer pressure, and yet.

Naoya found himself reminded of how he’d motivated Seth to deal with bullies (no version of Abel had ever needed the push), only this situation was the inverse of that. Yamato wasn’t going to kill himself when that meant he would miss the suffering of his enemy, and he certainly wasn’t going to help his enemy by ending any torment. If Alcor was willing to die instead of go insane and becoming a burden on others, if becoming more human and risking that could terrify him than Yamato, world expert on the Septentriones would be _more_ than happy to help him adjust.

It was Seth’s own fault for forgetting that he didn’t have to take these burdens on alone. Yes, he’d been born originally after the two of were gone, Abel dead and Naoya too ashamed to face his parents. Then, when the first real emergency came in this life, the two of them had been in different dimensions and Seth’s hell week had happened in a single instant from their perspective, so even if they’d known what was happening they wouldn’t have been able to react until it was over.

Trying to keep together a group of people so different that they should have gotten along like nitro and glycerin would have dragged up the echoes of unpleasant memories from the depths of his mind, even though Seth, unlike Abel, didn’t remember. When someone who had experienced so many incarnations didn’t remember, Naoya knew now, it meant they didn’t want to.

“At least I’m we’re not going to have to repopulate the planet,” Hiro told Naoya, in the way people might say ‘at least it’s not raining,’ or ‘at least the torturers will let us die eventually.’

At Gin’s startled laugh, Hiro gave him a stern look. “I may not remember the way they do, but I know one thing for sure: _it’s not as fun as it sounds_.” All of his friends seemed to know now what they wanted to do with their lives, or at least where to go next, except Saiduq and Yamato. He didn’t like to think about what he might have gone through to get so good, but the fact remained that he’d straightened all the others out in a week, while the world was ending.

Helping only two friends, one who hadn’t had a chance to grow, let alone grow up before and one who had been forced to grow into the spot he was born for so fast he didn’t _know_ anything else couldn’t be that hard. Not when they were both willing to listen to him.

Honestly, Naoya might be sick of dealing with most people, but these were Hiro’s friends, and this was something he wanted to do.

After everything that had happened between now and then, Yamato’s reaction to okonomiyaki was still the funniest thing he’d ever seen.


	6. Chapter 6

“Ah, you’re up, Director Hotsuin,” a tall woman said, coming in through the kitchen door with bits of leaves and vine tendrils clinging to her uniform and a blue flower stuck behind one of her ears, courtesy of one of the flower girls – Dr. Otome’s daughter, although she didn’t look anything like her.

“Commander Izuna,” the young man said, nodding in acknowledgement.

“I think we should talk.” As Izuna watched calculation appear in his eyes, she remembered that the first time she’d seen him, she’d wondered if he and Naoya were related somehow. Since it looked like he was trying to find some way to dismiss her, she added, “Off the record.”

Was he just glancing at Hiro, or Naoya as well? It was an improvement to see him value someone’s opinion besides his own, even though as it turned out, it _had_ been a waste of her forces to try to protect that tower. And the lives of thousands of surviving Japanese citizens: she’d just died with them.

Naoya ignored him, still slumped over the counter. She was sure he wasn’t actually feeling _that_ bad: when Naoya was unhappy he made it _very_ clear. He was probably just avoiding conscription for flower-hunting or setting up chairs under Amane’s direction. To be fair, he’d been up late last night and pulled an all-nighter the night before that. Not the kind of all-nighter Izuna had, going crazy fielding calls from everyone and their dog. _Gardening_.

She was sure he would have taken charge of the flower-gathering expeditions to make sure they didn’t damage ‘his’ plants if he didn’t abhor group activities or was in a mood to troll Amane Kuzuryu. Was he irritated with her because she’d missed his last attempt to annoy her?

Personally, she hoped this dysfunctional faux courtship continued as long as possible so she didn’t have to worry about him ever having any kids.

“Can I come with you?” Hiro asked her, after looking at Yamato.

“Sure, if he doesn’t mind?”

“Why would I?” Yamato wondered. Oh, he hadn’t wanted to share information with her, but Hiro was actually intelligent and worthy of Yamato’s company.

And he might be able to help.

“Alright, then.” She nodded towards the door.

There were so many people around everywhere that it was hard to find a good place to talk. The jungle didn’t have much visibility, had flower hunters in it and Yamato scowled at the idea of going in _there_. They weren’t the only people walking towards the beach and when they got there they found Hiro’s parents, among others, enjoying the sun or playing in the waves. A scowly, kind of short silver-haired boy (Keita, was it?) wearing dark blue swim trunks was standing on a dune with his arms folded. Someone had written Lifeguard with an arrow pointing to him in the sand in front of his feet and jammed a beach umbrella into the dune next to him so he got some shade.

“How did that happen?” Yamato wondered.

“He finally figured out that you get stronger by protecting other people,” Hiro answered, voice quiet enough Keita couldn’t hear it over the crowd. “Well, think about it.”

Hn. “Training never does mimic a crisis very well, and intelligent people don’t find themselves in many emergencies.” While fools could be counted on to get themselves in trouble. The pressure of those days had pushed Yamato to his limits: he hadn’t worked as hard to protect Japan because he hadn’t cared as much about the fallen, ungrateful country, even though it was his family duty and obviously failure would reflect badly on him. “But why are you happy with this when he’s clearly not doing his job?” Yamato looked at Airi and a man with very strange hair she was attempting to drown.

“Airi and her dad are fighting, they’re not in danger.” Both of them were skilled enough that Airi’s father wasn’t in any real danger of being drowned.

“And Keita does hate others stealing his fights, doesn’t he.” Yamato nodded. Airi was an ally, so it was obvious whose side Keita should be on, and if Airi succeeded in drowning the man, then one more person who had attempted to spy on JPs and violate several national secrets acts would be silenced.

“There,” Izuna said, pointing at the boathouse by the side of the dock and walking briskly over to it. Seeing Hiro remove his shoes, Yamato paused to do the same, immediately noticing how that reduced the amount the sand dragged at his steps.

Izuna knocked at the door briskly before going in, just in case anyone was changing in there. “Alright,” she said, sitting down on the side of the boat after pushing it a little to make sure it wouldn’t slide around. “The good, the bad or the ugly?”

“You mean news?” Hiro asked, leaning back against the door, his white jacket and jeans somehow looking celestial instead of normal next to Yamato’s black and bronze formal uniform.

Right. At her nod, Yamato asked, “What qualifies as ‘ugly?’”

“Someone took photos of you two cuddled up together on the beach last night and somehow hacked the JPs server to anonymously e-mail them to most of us, except Naoya and Yuzu.”

“Atsuro,” Hiro knew right away. “The photos aren’t really his kind of prank, but the hacking would be.” He frowned. “Normally, though, he’d know that leaving Yuzu out would just make it more obvious. Oh, right.” Bachelor party last night, Atsuro talking Saiduq into startling people like that… Yeah. Probably not his brightest evening.

As Hiro’s frown deepened, Yamato started to smirk. “How is that ugly?”

Izuna and Hiro both started at him, although Izuna was clearly thinking, ‘that explains a lot,’ instead of being startled. During their meetings, she’d never once caught Yamato glancing at her or Makoto’s breasts. As a career soldier, she’d been forced to accept the reality that as hard as the men around her tried to be professional (and they’d damn well better succeed when it came to their conduct), men, especially young men, lost IQ points the closer they came to breasts the way Izuna herself lost her innate discipline and composure and had to resist the urge to use baby talk the closer she came to a kitty-a cat. Imagine if half the people she knew were carrying around a pair of adorable little baby kittens, and she wasn’t allowed to pet or stare at them, on pain of pain.

Yet Yamato seemed unaffected, meaning he was either gay, had evolved an immunity to that debuff, had so many IQ points it didn’t make a noticeable difference, or the stick up his ass was so big it didn’t leave any room for a libido.

What Yamato was actually thinking was that when the girls saw those pictures, they would stop trying to take Hiro for themselves. He was lucky that Hinako, Makoto and Otome clearly considered themselves too old, while Airi wasn’t going to do anything more than crush, Io was still a little too shy and worried about breaking their new friendship to have the courage to make a move & Fumi, the only one among them that he considered intelligent enough to be an opponent, was clearly assessing Hiro’s cousin instead for his potential as an acquisition, one that would advance her interests.

As for the others, Ronaldo was too old and tactless: it would be easy to goad him into saying something that would make Hiro tell him to leave Yamato alone. Age wouldn’t stop Joe, who lacked any sort of sense, but he was about to be married and was the sort to do something foolish and make his wife keep them apart out of reasonable jealousy. Daichi and Hiro had spent enough years together that the relationship they had was clearly the sort natural to them, Keita wouldn’t want to show weakness the way wanting to hang around someone that much would and Jungo simply wasn’t bright enough to be competition.

He’d been correct in his earlier assessment that now that the crisis was over, the only one trying to take Hiro away from him would be Al Saiduq. Still, while the opportunity those photos presented was interesting, _was_ Hiro at all interested in men? If he was, Yamato should learn how to use that angle. If not, it would still be useful for deterring half the competition.

Sex had always sounded disgusting, but so had okonomiyaki. Yamato already had profiles of a half-dozen young women with various supernatural powers on his desk, mostly ones from the three other great devil summoner clans of Japan. He was sure the higher-ups considered the amount of inbreeding there an advantage, since it made it more likely their children would inherit a good amount of the Hotsuin power. Looking at a family tree of a single one the four clans didn’t make it obvious, but they _were_ breeding for power, after all. Computer model the four together, and what a tangled web they wove. The last time an outsider’s child was considered part of the core clan instead of forbidden training and watched carefully to see when they would turn to the dark was one of the Kuzunoha, a ‘Nagi’ who had the good fortune to be adopted by her uncle, the current Genrin, who still had to take her outside the country for training. And the Kuzunoha were one of the more liberal clans.

It _was_ rather pleasant to think of certain people’s reactions to the idea that he had no interest in being their prize stud, let alone marrying a clan heiress and allowing the Hotsuin powers, knowledge, prestige and legacy to become simply a part of their clan’s.

Izuna cleared her throat, recognizing plotting when she saw it. If anything, it was reassuring to see that Yamato just saw this as an opportunity to screw with people instead of either wanting revenge or wanting that boy… Damn, they were both little boys, weren’t they. Yamato was even the younger of the two. She needed to remember that Yamato wasn’t Naoya, that the boy was a boy and that his training as an adept and leader meant there were plenty of other things he hadn’t learned. There wasn’t an ancient looking out through those eyes, just someone too smart for his own good.

Smart and _angry_.

“The bad news is, they want you back _yesterday._ ”

“What?” he asked her, eyes narrowing. “You don’t mean for debriefing, do you.” Or criminal charges.

“The Dragon Stream and the towers saved the world, or at least protected a handful of Japanese cities long enough for your officers,” and new volunteers, “to save the world. That proves that your ancestors were right: they’re vitally necessary to Japan and they should serve their other purpose as well.”

“Their other purpose?” Hiro asked the two of them.

“Having the towers built, hiding such a large structure under the Diet Building: the seals that protected us against the Void and the Septentrions – they were at least weakened inside the seals – were designed to shield against ‘the power of the stars.’ That’s why the Japanese government allowed the Hotsuin all the resources and access they needed to complete the projects, and why we still have a part of the government as our personal fiefdom. The end of the Cold War made the seals and the Hotsuin less important, otherwise JPs would have been able to mount a better defense against the Shomonkai.” This wasn’t amused speculation the way Yamato’s prior thoughts had been: there was nothing funny about this. “The threat of the septentrions is over, or will be. But North Korea, China, other projects: they’re not going to allow JPs to close down, are they.” Not right after they’d proven their worth against a far worse test.

“You’re talking about atomic bombs? But stars are powered by fusion, not fission!” Hiro looked startled, a very odd look on him, especially since Yamato hadn’t been there to see Al Saiduq appear behind Hiro _over and over_. To be fair, Al Saiduq hadn’t understood what Hiro and Daichi were objecting to because he hadn’t understood that they were capable of not knowing that he was there, watching over them, shifted into the dimension of the records or not. He’d told the Shining One that since they allied, he was always with him, hadn’t he? Then there was that time he’d tried to _lead the way_ to something through what amounted to hyperspace, and when Daichi pointed out that they couldn’t see him and couldn’t follow him, just taken Daichi’s arm and pulled him along entirely casually. Saiduq would still be doing the same thing if his home dimension existed, Hiro knew, because it was his home dimension, after all. In retrospect, it was odd that the other septentriones hadn’t traveled that way, although thank goodness they hadn’t because it would have been impossible for JPs to defend the towers if the septentriones could just walk right past them.

Maybe the others hadn’t understood the concept of not being seen any more than Saiduq did? If Saiduq wasn’t aware he was vanishing, then why did it happen?

Had some ancient Hotsuin ancestor told Alcor to disappear and stop staring at him (at least visibly) the way Hiro had told him to stop appearing like that? Had Alcor somehow gotten the impression that it was polite to not interact with the level of reality humans perceived when he wasn’t planning to interact with people?

Well, right now there wasn’t any point in thinking about it, since Alcor had stopped doing it (maybe the demon body didn’t do it automatically) and Hiro had Yamato to worry about, too.

“Most powerful bombs only use fission to set off a fusion reaction: it’s the fusion that creates most of the blast,” Izuna told him. “Think of plutonium as like gunpowder: the gunpowder gets it moving, but it’s the bullet that does the damage. And I’m told the seal wards off both of the nuclear forces?”

“The weak nuclear force as well as the strong, yes,” Yamato said, frowning. “They’re not going to let me go, are they?” he admitted to himself, only able to do so at all, let alone say it aloud, because Hiro was here.

Izuna didn’t need to answer that. Not when he was such an important national security asset. Not when the seals had been recreated by a septentrione, even if one that was allied with humans (certain humans, or a certain human, at least) and needed to be checked over. “If all else fails, they can bring certain charges and I bet it would take them a long time to get to trial.” Meanwhile, if Yamato wanted to be under house arrest instead of in a common cell, a pretty young man like him?

Given the killer instinct she could see in his eyes, the first convict to try anything would be looking at a long hospital stay at the least. If Yamato had managed to get his hands on a weapon already, and she had no doubt he would? Not to mention it would take him about five seconds to piss off whatever Yakuza were running the place. Typical teenager in this, at least: he had issues with authority, clearly, even when he was the authority.

She didn’t _think_ he was enough of a sociopath to have the time of his life fighting for his life until they had to put him in solitary like that. Not after fighting demons: they’d be too tame by comparison.

“So… what’s the good news?” Hiro asked her, hoping for something that would cheer Yamato up. Again.

Orange eyes gave the young man a long, measuring look. “At this point, I’d say that you are.”

“What?” Hiro asked her. Seriously? Why even pretend that there was good news if she wasn’t going to tell Yamato… Well, alright, telling Yamato that he had allies and should ask for help probably would have been telling Yamato something he didn’t know, when he didn’t even realize that the people of JPs adored him. Stern but fair: he didn’t ask anything unreasonable of anyone and then blame them when they couldn’t do it. Promotions were earned, and any supervisor who misused their power would quite likely never work in Japan again. During the crisis, he’d worked himself just as hard and put himself in just as much danger as any of them. The impromptu funeral speeches when he died were all true, and Daichi, Io and many of the others _hadn’t_ worked for him for years.

To Yamato, they were just his minions, and he looked after them because to do otherwise would be stupid. If anything, he treated them as he would have liked to be treated, without demands that were unreasonable of idiots (or children) and without pretending he cared or trying to be over-controlling.

They knew where they stood with him, and if where they stood was under his heel? That was the reality of being a boss, and at least they could count on him not to grind them down into the dirt. His people were his people, and he looked after them. If he spent their lives, at least it would be on something worth the price.

Or at least something Yamato considered worth the price. Like a utopia, for the world to be remade into a paradise where everything was fair, where the most able would rise to the top, and only a fool would fail to look after their underlings.

Yamato had the position as head of JPs because of his birth. He had the _power_ instead of just being a figurehead because he’d fought for it, taking down every individual that tried to control him until he ran into the system itself, Izuna knew. The same system Izuna ran up against every once in awhile, but she had an advantage. With Babel destroyed, the power that ran the summoning server had joined with the King of Bel.

That was what Naoya had demonstrated last night – what the difference between even the most advanced analog spellcasting and his programs was. His programs that wouldn’t work without the authorization of the King of Bel.

Al Saiduq, Alcor, had created an alternative, but one that relied on the Akasha. The Akasha, the Throne of Heaven, he’d just destroyed, nearly dying with it. The Hotsuin had worked to create a blend of technology and demon summoning starting when computers still used vacuum tubes: the seals that bound Shiva and the others had been redesigned in the 1950s. Their programs still relied on a personal contract with the head of the family and drew on the dragon stream for power: once the ecosystems that fed the dragon stream had been wiped out, except for five cities? If it weren’t for the Nicaea app, JPs summoning demons to defend the seals would have drained the seals of power until they became useless. Still, they hadn’t been capable of generating computerized sacrificial rituals allowing ‘skill cracks,’ much less allowing humans to use demonic abilities like that. The Kuzunoha summoning system was based on paper seal tubes handed down through the family: no one but the family could use them and trying to take one apart to reverse engineer the design would destroy it. Even they couldn’t cast and swap around spells as freely as app users could, but needed to borrow the power of a specific demon, after convincing that demon to loan it to them.

In order for the JSDF to be able to effectively fight demons, they needed Naoya’s program. The relative slowness and inefficiency of the Hotsuin program meant they wouldn’t stand a chance against an app user or a Kuzunoha, both of whom could summon near-instantly.

In order to use Naoya’s program, they needed the goodwill of the King of Bel. Whose little brother had just befriended Yamato.

Even if Yamato didn’t seem to have figured this out, the other one had. “Good luck,” she told Hiro, shaking her head. Then she stood up, smirking. “I’ll leave you two alone.”

“What was she talking about?” Yamato asked once she’d shut the door behind her.

Hiro restrained the urge to sigh. “Alright. You’ve probably heard of this thing called friendship, right? And you probably think it’s a lot of nonsense, because people harp on about it… Oh, right, not to you.” Why would they. “And you wouldn’t have watched those kind of shows. I bet they only let you watch educational programming.” The more he thought about why Yamato was the way he was the worse it got. Like Al Saiduq appearing behind him. Once was, well, it happened, twice made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up, twenty was _will you stop doing that!_ “It’s pretty clear that you didn’t have any friends before. Ever. At least not real ones. But you’ve definitely got one now. Me.” And Makoto would definitely be one once she got past the fact that Yamato was her boss, but Hiro wasn’t going to try to explain subtleties like that now. “You didn’t have a real family, either. But what friends and family are _supposed to do_ , although of course people are people,” he wasn’t going to try to sell Yamato a fairy tale, “Is have your back. So let’s go find my brothers, and maybe Saiduq, and figure out a way so you don’t have to go back if you don’t want to.”

“You’d weaken Japan’s defenses against nuclear arms for the sake of…” for my sake, “a ‘friend?’” That was just as ridiculous as that word itself was.

“If that’s what you want, then yes,” Hiro told him. How to explain this? He wondered again. “Remember how you said that if we did your merit system, I might overthrow you, and you wouldn’t mind that?”

Yamato nodded, waiting for Hiro to make his point.

“I think that was because you trusted that I would do the right thing. That you could rely on me to do the right thing. That I wouldn’t do anything to you without a good reason, screw up the world you wanted or stab you in the back,” win without it being fair or right, use Yamato’s trust against him. “And I trusted you to tell us what to do even after you revealed that you wanted a world of merit and you knew that we might not necessarily.” Yamato hadn’t found a way to send them to their deaths. Or no, there was a lot more do it than that. “Look, do you want to go back, or do you want to find another way?”

“I don’t want those fools to control me.”

“If you don’t want to go back, then I don’t want you to either, because you’re my friend.” Freedom, Hiro realized, and once again thought about how Yamato, Ronaldo and Al Saiduq had all wanted the same thing, in the end, although Al Saiduq was a bit more realistic, really. He’d known that freedom for humanity wouldn’t necessarily lead to a paradise, but at least that world would be the world they built, and they’d have every chance he’d managed to give them. “Why don’t I just show you what friends are for, so you can see for yourself,” he said, and held his hand out.

Despite all this talk about friendship, of all the inane things, Yamato still took it. Both because he wouldn’t back down from a challenge and because this was Hiro, who had more than proved himself.

“Right,” Hiro said, and nodded, blue eyes meeting Yamato’s grey. “Now let’s go give them hell.”


	7. Chapter 7

Al Saiduq was the easiest to find, since he was still hovering a few inches above the roof. The house was only one story tall over here, so it shouldn’t be too hard to get up there, Hiro thought, looking for the right kind of tree. “Give me a boost,” he told Yamato, when he found one. Good hand and footholds near the ground weren’t as important as once you got higher up and actually had to worry about falling, and even though this looked like an easy climb, he had no idea if Yamato knew how to climb. Certainly not tree-climbing, but gyms had rockclimbing walls, didn’t they?

“Why do you want to talk to Alcor?”

“Because I have a few plans, and this one’s the easiest. I still want to verify that it will work, just to be sure, since it won’t take too long and I don’t want to find out that I’m bluffing. Once that’s done, we can see what other options we have,” Hiro said, deciding he’d do without the boost even if that set a bad example (he’d grown a lot more cautious about tree-climbing once Yuzu’s kids started following him around) and bracing one foot on the wall of the house instead, pushing off and up a bit to grab a branch. Once both his feet and his right arm were securely in place, because Yamato might not be the tallest person in the world but he was pretty tough and that meant he wouldn’t be light, he reached down to Yamato. “Come on.”

Yamato took it, but the way he used the wall and kicked up as Hiro pulled to find a spot for his foot where a branch left the trunk proved that he knew what he was doing, so Hiro stopped trying to help him since that was actually more dangerous than both of them just concentrating on what they alone were doing.  From that point it was easy to get onto the roof, though.

Saiduq wasn’t where he was before: he must have seen them moving around the edge of the house instead of going in and wondered what they were doing. That was a good sign: at least he was paying attention to things instead of just wallowing. Or actively trying to avoid them. “Shining One?” he asked as Hiro landed on the roof, then moved out of Yamato’s way.

Hiro wondered what to say, then settled on, “You do look like a Christmas tree ornament.” A six-pointed star the same black as the cube, wrapped in silver tinsel. Actually, that black reminded him of the void, except, “Are those supposed to be stars?”

“Yes,” Saiduq said. “This isn’t how I would have manifested before. I intended to become the new world.”

The new material universe, Hiro realized. “I wondered why you called me Shining One: Stars shine, don’t they? So was that title treating me as an equal, just being respectful, or did you mean something else?” he asked as he sat down on the ridge of the roof, Saiduq about even with him since he hovered further down the slope between the ridge and the exterior wall.

Yamato remained standing, arms folded, despite the effort it took to maintain that position on an angled surface.

It took Saiduq a moment to respond. “The will of humanity had to be united for Polaris to reorder or restore the world as anyone desired. When you registered for Nicaea, your energy readings were not only of unusual magnitude, but frequencies very similar to the base human frequencies. Since humanity is not united the way we septentriones were before I became separate, humans would have many different desires. Yet you were clearly the best representative of humanity as a whole, and other humans would likely follow you. Not because of the light, but because the light indicates that your nature is such that it would be so.”

“So I had the best odds of changing Polaris’ will.”

“That as well. By uniting the will of humanity, you made it possible for me to restore this world to an intact state without creating conflicts between how people were and how they became.” Or without having to fight the will of humanity.

And he’d changed Al Saiduq’s will before that, Hiro knew. He had other things to think about now, though. “You know how you gave Yamato’s family the knowledge and ability to control the dragon stream?”

“Of course I kept those memories, Shining One.” Saiduq sounded a little surprised: Hiro didn’t think that he would carelessly forget something that had affected Yamato’s life and those of his clan.

“Can you take that power away?”

Yamato realized what Hiro’s first plan had been. Of course. If he lost the power to control the dragon stream, he was of no further use to them. Well, that was untrue: powerful sorcerers had many uses, and he was a genius as well, but he would no longer be vital to Japan’s defense.

“…I am not sure. I no longer am able to interfere with humanity.”

“Except,” Hiro corrected him, “In the way everyone does. We all change each others’ minds, and our own, every time we interact with anyone. My life changed because I met you, and I don’t regret that. Don’t think that if you do anything you’ll take away our freedom. You’re a person too.”

“Without the Akashic Records, I would not be able to edit the dragon stream.” Saiduq hovered, considering. Hiro wondered if he was changing the subject by returning to the original subject, but first he’d deal with Yamato. “However, the dragon stream obeyed your will. If Yamato Hotsuin no longer wishes it to obey him, and you wished the same, it would heed your will, Shining One.”

“That would just make Hiro the one they need,” Yamato told Alcor.

“But I have big brothers,” Hiro pointed out. “It’s not perfect. It would be better if we could just say, ‘Whoops, the dragon stream control system worked because of the Akashic Record, and now that’s gone.’” That way no one would be in trouble for sabotaging a defense system like that. “And _not_ be lying,” he corrected himself, looking at Yamato. “You can get caught if you’re lying.”

“I know _that._ ” When buried in documentation in triplicate, never tell any story you couldn’t keep straight: that he knew.

“So: would it obey my brothers, or just me?” Hiro asked Al Saiduq.

“Naoya, yes. Abel… If Yamato Hotsuin agrees that it should. It was also used to defend against demons, and he has a great deal of demonic power.”

“So we can definitely use Naoya to play bad cop… I should probably ask him what he thinks before I make any more plans, or he’ll make a fuss about me plotting without him.” From the smile there were stories behind that, but Hiro glanced back at Yamato next. “So we’ve got a backup plan, at least.” Hmm. “Yamato, would you mind staying here for a bit?”

Yamato asked, “Why?” Although he presumed Hiro had a reason.

“Saiduq is my friend too, and he’s been up here all morning.” While Yamato had only found out he had a real problem a few minutes ago. “Consider it a case study.”

“If you say so.” And if it wasn’t Hiro saying so, it was clear, Yamato would never consider it. He still looked to the side and wiped imaginary dust off the sleeve of his uniform.

“First, you’re not the only person who did something showy last night. Aya told Gin about Naoya casting a lot of spells in clear view of the coast when that’s violating his parole. He’s still a Japanese citizen, but they don’t have to allow him in the country, and right now people are worried and it’s not a good time to start making points like that.” Hiro rolled his eyes just a little, like he was looking at some higher power. “And there were other demons on the island last night too, and no one panicked. Besides, I have it on good authority that a bachelor party is the perfect time to do embarrassing stuff: you’re practically supposed to.”

“This form doesn’t seem to be bothering anyone. That’s very unusual, for humans.” Alcor had usually at least taken on a humanoid form, even to speak to the Hotsuin.

“Half the people here are used to demons and the other half are taking their cues from them. Society defines what’s normal,” according to Naoya. “So: why are you staying like this, up here, alone?”Hiro asked.  And no avoiding the question.

“At first, I wanted to see the stars without bothering anyone.” The ships had pinged him: he’d belatedly realized that he might be scaring people and come down, settling here. “Even if none of them are alive.”

Oh. “You miss your family, don’t you,” Hiro realized.

“I missed them before this. It was not pleasant to be separated from the others, but once I understood humanity, even a little, I couldn’t go back to not understanding.” That wouldn’t be right. “Truth is not defined by the majority, even though I did wonder sometimes if there was something wrong with me.” He had been infected, yes, but what was wrong with that? “They had to be stopped, Shining One. I hoped that humanity could change its fate. If they understood, I hope they would have agreed.” Because to choose the extermination of billions of real people, even if they weren’t one-of-many, even if they could be wrong about things? Even though their aloneness and the changeability of the world around them meant they simply couldn’t be expected to harmonize as easily as the septentriones had?

“If they were like you, then I think they would have,” Hiro told him. The thing was, if they were like Al Saiduq they would have tried to understand in the first place instead of ignoring him. So this was technically false comfort, and Yamato seemed to have picked up on that, from the look he gave Hiro, but it went right over Al Saiduq’s head.

“Thank you, Shining One.”

The little frown of slight contempt on Yamato’s face was actually a good sign. Just like that JPs trooper who had screwed up and was so afraid of being punished, then surprised and relieved when Yamato hadn’t bothered. Yamato wasn’t going to hold Al Saiduq accountable for the side effects of giving the Hotsuin their power and knowledge in order to help protect humanity when Al Saiduq was clearly too naïve to have known what he was doing.

“Why don’t you come down. You can stay in this form if you want, but people are worried about you, up here all alone.” Hiro patted Al Saiduq casually on one of the arms of the star, as one might clap a friend on the shoulder or reassure a pet or child.

Al Saiduq changed back, but Hiro said, “Actually, wait until you’re down on the ground to be human. You can learn how to climb trees later.”

“I can still levitate like this, Shining One.” It wasn’t as though he actually was human.

“Alright, see you down there,” Hiro said, standing up. “Let’s go find Midori, she can tell us where Abel is.”

One of the fun parts of visiting Naoya with Daichi was going by Shibuya and staring at all the weird people, playing ‘how high did they have to be to wear that?’ At least before Daichi had realized that as men, they weren’t supposed to be paying attention to clothing, no matter how damn hilarious it was.

Loki could also be counted on for free candy, which made sense once Abel told Hiro about all of Loki’s kids and Naoya told Hiro a legend about a couple whose child was in danger. They’d first called on Odin to help the child, then Thor, but neither of the Asgard cared about a mere child, who wasn’t a warrior to fight for them in Ragnarok. It was Loki that came to help the little one, because while adults who were damn fools in their arrogance or assumptions of invulnerability were asking for it, Loki had always had a soft spot for children.

A floating cube or star was random, but Hiro and his family had seen weirder. Although it was kind of weird, in context, that Al Saiduq manifested in such sensical geometric shapes when Dubhe was a twisted ice cream cone, for example. Actually, Mizar’s main body had been kind of cute in a very weird way. Or maybe it was the way it had desperately grabbed for the building when it found itself being _eaten_ by a _dragon_. That week had given Hiro a lot of compassion for those struggling desperately to survive. Still, when Mizar had come to destroy what was left of humanity, break their fragile holds on survival, it had been rather cathartic to stamp on Mizer’s fingers and watch the dragon stream swallow him up as he madly tried to slip out of its jaws. Not so much fun for the replicating septentrione when the boot was on the other foot, now was it?

Not that he was going to say that out loud about Al Saiduq’s twin star.

What he did say aloud was, “I’m sure he and Fumi could write something and design the equipment so you could control the dragon stream remotely. There’s Naoya, too. Actually, I’m sure they can do better than that. That way, you wouldn’t have to spend any more time on it than you want to.”

“You’re finding different options for me?” Different plans Yamato could pursue?

“Right. I know you can come up with your own plans,” although in this situation? When Yamato was so used to failure that his only plan for freedom and escaping control had been to destroy and reshape the world? “But I wanted to show you why Izuna thought the good news was that you had resources that could get you out of this.”

“You,” Yamato said, easily jumping down the rest of the way. That word was said firmly, but the next, “Friendship,” still contained a little disbelief.

“That’s what this is called,” Hiro told him. “All of the others would have died to protect me if they had to, because they knew I’d do my best to make sure they got revived, and that I’d do the same for them. But also because they thought I was worth dying for, because I’d make sure their goals were accomplished. That I wouldn’t let their deaths be meaningless.” Even thinking about them dying… “That I _cared_ enough about them to try as hard as I could for their sakes, so they cared for me in return.” Even Fumi and Keita, as focused on their goals as they were, because they knew he _got_ them, and that was rare. “You protected us, Yamato, so all of us would do our best to protect you.” Not so much Ronaldo, but Yamato hadn’t protected him, so fair was fair. “And your dream of a world where things are fair, where no one has to bow down to anyone who doesn’t deserve to have power over them.” Who wasn’t worthy of that trust.

It said something that Yamato had only been able to put it in terms of strength. It also said something that it hadn’t occurred to him that strong people might abuse their underlings, might possess power without the sense to use it properly.

He could see Yamato struggling to hide his response to those words, that they’d reached him and that Yamato just didn’t know how to deal with being cared for or feeling touched. To spare his pride, Hiro looked away, finding Saiduq. “Is Midori still in the bride’s suite?”

“As far as I know. She hasn’t left the building since she inspected the courtyard where they’re holding the ceremony.”

“Right.” Hiro nodded. “Let’s drop you off with her so she can find you something to wear for the wedding.”

Or that was the plan, anyway, but after Midori finished quickly mending a tear in Hinako’s dancer’s costume that happened when a plant caught on it, both Saiduq and Hiro were dragged off to the piles of clothing as she complimented Yamato on his uniform. “Did you design it yourself?”

“One of my ancestors did.” Although he did approve of how it made him look. Very martial, very powerful and in control. Very intimidating.

“But Hiro,” she said to her honorary nephew, “You can’t wear jeans and a white windbreaker to a wedding! And I should have taken care of you yesterday.” She clicked her tongue at Saiduq. “Who dressed you?”

“Is there something wrong with what I’m wearing?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said both bluntly and cheerfully, bringing a small smile to Yamato’s lips. “Don’t worry, big sis Midori’ll fix you right up!” the cheerful glasses ‘girl’ assured him. “White is the color of death here and the bride’s color in the West, red is the bride’s color here and a color of blood and death in the West, green is bad luck at weddings in the West because it’s the color of jealousy…” she said to herself as she dug through piles of costumes, tossing a few in their directions. Hiro was expecting that, and held out his arms, but the first one landed over Saiduq’s head, and he’d just tugged it down when another followed it.

Yamato was beginning to wonder if she was doing this on purpose. Most likely not to torment the septentrione, but at least to cover over that eyesore he was wearing.

“If it’s bad luck, why is Naoya wearing green?” Hiro asked her.

“Because after all they’ve been through, they don’t need to worry about a little bad luck,” Midori said with a bright little laugh. Silly Hiro. “And Naoya looks good in it,” which was of course the most important thing. “As for you,” she pointed at Saiduq, “Pink, now…” There were four colors that _everyone_ looked good in, no matter what color their hair and skin were, including one particular shade of rose. “Bringing a little color to your cheeks would make you look much more human,” she said, moving right up into his personal space to tilt his head from side to side. “If you didn’t want to change back, we were going to put you up over the altar, by the way.”

“What do you mean?” he asked her. “Because I was the administrator?” He hoped not.

“No, because you’re a symbol of marriage.” After the Lockdown Midori had studied a lot of mythology both for its own sake and the sake of new designs: even though most people didn’t know what had happened or didn’t remember, a renewed interest in it among the Japanese public had helped her now-professional cosplay & cosplay video blogging career flourish. “Not to mention health, good luck and clear-sightedness. We have the saying that someone who cannot see Alcor will die by the end of the year, while your name, Al Saidak, the test, comes from the Arabs using you to test how clearly someone could see. Although the Greek legend isn’t as happy: they think that you’re one of the Pleiades that got separated from her sisters.” She patted him on his uncombed head. “I looked you up to find out what color you were, but we can’t dress you in white, it’s too close to your skin tone. You were wearing those colors because of that red dwarf that orbits you and because your star name comes from ‘black horse,’ right?” So he at least had some talent for symbolism if not for actual design or coloration.

“Well, really I’m named after Alioth and he …was named for a black horse.” He was far from the most important of the septentriones: the Arabs also had another saying that he was the least significant star in the heavens.

“Let’s see,” she said cheerfully, looking at Yamato’s black and bronze as she casually pushed Saiduq’s arms up and patted down his sides. “You are a star, so setting you in black would be appropriate, or maybe dark blue.” But she only needed one outfit for him right now: someone could take him shopping and teach him to dress himself later. “Not that much red, but _some,_ now…” The trick would be to add color to him instead of making him look like a ghost compared to some too-vibrant color. “Yes, start with those,” she said, shooing him towards the walk-in-closet. The bathroom was serving as the other changing room. “That way I can see how you look in them.” The shape of his face, the color of his skin and his overall body shape were all slightly _off_ , and she would have wanted to confirm that the overall theory worked in this particular case with any body type or other feature she hadn’t worked with before.

Dressing him for the wedding wouldn’t be too tricky: traditional costumes involved more fabric, which was a good thing since it would help hide his oddness. The trouble would be finding him normal clothes. He could _not_ get away with shorts, especially since if she managed to set his looks off well enough that they changed from weird and off-putting to exotic he _would_ be checked out, and to a trained eye walking him walk in those pants gave away that there was something slightly off about the proportions of his legs and perhaps his knee joint. Even if there wasn’t anything unnatural about it, he was definitely far, far too gangly. His arms and legs probably looked like rice noodles with knobs on. She hoped he could either shapeshift or put some meat on his bones the old-fashioned way, because while she could do her best to disguise that… Well, she’d ask Abel. “Where do you think you’re sneaking off to?” she asked Hiro.

“I was helping Yamato with something, and this one looks fine,” he said, holding up a Heian period costume in blue and white.

“Actually…” she said, starting to grin. Since the drape of traditional clothing would make Al Saiduq look less like a scarecrow, “Naoya’s going as a court sorcerer,” one taking extreme liberties with the uniform, but that was Naoya for you, and Abe no Seimei did it first, “And of course Abel’s the emperor, sooooo…”

* * *

Biting back a demand to know what just happened when he knew, he’d been there for it, Yamato instead said, “I can see how she survived the Lockdown.” Fluffy on the outside, a will that looked at the objections of both people and reality as obstacles to be batted aside on the charge towards her obsessions on the inside.

The door opened behind them. “And don’t get them stained, or I’m taking it out of your hides!”

“I know, Midori!” Hiro called back, equally cheerful. He’d gotten to wear his favorite colors and he’d liked jackets and stuff since Abel let him play with Abel’s official cape, the one that was always hot to the touch, and figured out a range of uses for it from just wearing it, feeling it follow along behind him like he was a dragon with a big long tail, to warming up snowforts. It was the attempt to roast marshmallows with it that made Abel stop bringing it with him when he came home, not because Hiro’d made it all sticky but because it had eaten the marshmallows and wrapped itself around the stick. Given Hiro’s appetite for candy and messyness at that age, Abel hadn’t wanted it to get the idea that little brother was on the menu.

Touching the hat Midori had put on his head and secured with various clips and pins when it became clear that no amount of detangler was going to fix hair that hadn’t been brushed in the history of ever in time for the ceremony, Al Saiduq looked more than a little confused himself.

“Do you know how to manage the robe and sleeves?” Hiro asked him. He was pretty sure Yamato would have been taught, because his was an ancient family and they would have wanted him to think traditional duty and so on, but Saiduq?

“One of the Hotsuin insisted on teaching me, Shining One.”

Yamato could guess why. “Of course. Otherwise you would have been an embarrassment to the clan.” What kind of supernatural patron tripped over his robes?

“It’s this I don’t know how to use,” Saiduq said, touching the quiver at this back. Midori would use the bow to mark where he was supposed to sit.

“I don’t think anyone will expect you to,” Hiro told him. “It’s only an elective, or club activity.” Depending on where one went to school. “Just be glad these are the simple versions. I’ve _seen_ what she’s done for historical productions.” Midori did costuming for a lot of samurai shows, which was why she had so many leftovers close to their sizes.

“I can,” Yamato said. “They had me trained in archery even though the Hotsuin abilities don’t work that way.” Meditation on the goal, though? Specifically on killing the target? It had been a worthwhile activity.

Well, at least they knew that Abel was around the other side of the house, working on the spring the garden’s water came from with Naoya. That part of the garden was out of sight of the main house, thanks to a hedge meant to give it some privacy: they’d gone there to stay out of sight of-

“Hiro! Priestess Kuzuryu says it’s almost time for the rehearsal,” Airi called, running up behind them.

“How much longer?” He was best man, he couldn’t miss the rehearsal, but he couldn’t just skip out on Yamato.

“Seventeen minutes,” Airi said, checking her phone.

“Then I’ll be there in fifteen,” Hiro said, picking up his robes so he could run.

When they got there Naoya was alone, aerating the soil by repeatedly stabbing a pitchfork down into the grass. He looked at them somewhat curiously as Hiro stopped only three feet away from the man with the newly-sharpened trident.

“Where’s Abel?” Hiro asked. Naoya still had mixed feelings about the fearlessness of little brothers. On the one hand, it was definitely preferable to his own kin being afraid of him, fearing the ‘first murderer.’ On the other, a little more respect would be appreciated sometimes.

“Finding me more rocks. Why?”

“Izuna said they’re going to want Yamato back to keep the dragon stream shield up. Saiduq and I can make it not obey him anymore, but do you and Abel have any other ideas? Maybe a remote control so he doesn’t have to be head of JPs?”

Yamato was slowly turning, taking in everything around him. The spring in the east, the hedge that was actually vines tumbling over a small outcropping of rock in the north, the… There was barely any power in it yet, the island just hadn’t been here that long, but he could already see where the rain would be guided to soak down into the soil, the paths humans would just find themselves taking to the bench by the spring and the seemingly-natural (if it weren’t for the smell of cut greenery) entrance to the jungle beyond. Real feng shui was _rare_. There had once been a clan that specialized in it in Japan, but an internal argument led to the majority of the clan being forced out of the country and wanting to smash everything protected by what remained of the clan, which unfortunately included quite a lot of important temples and seals. Then the remnants of the clan in Japan had died out.

Oh, the trade attracted the sensitive, but it also attracted charlatans. For things only tangentially related to it, like home decoration, it was easily possible for a civilian to hire three different ‘experts’ and get three different recommendations. But even without getting out a compass to chart magnetic north and determining where the sun rose and set at various points of the year, even when there wasn’t enough energy yet to flow along the pathways Naoya was creating, he could still feel how _comfortable_ it was here, everything set so that by doing as its nature bade it, it would ease everything else’s way.

“I did the engineering for the Hanging Gardens,” Naoya said with a smirk, noticing the widening of Yamato’s eyes. Yes: he was just that damn good. “They were just going to have slaves carry up buckets of water,” that was how most fountains worked back then, “but I managed to direct the city and the garden’s energy to draw water up a series of pipes,” not pushing water uphill, but drawing it to where it was needed. “Of course, the main problem was the levitation. In addition to garden beds and paths, some plants could draw the nutrients they needed from the smoke from all those cookfires.” Of course, he hadn’t been able to actually work on the structure, much less decree plant placement without the curse kicking in, and eventually a corrupt head gardener overtapped the central and cornerstone trees to sell the extra frankincense and pocket the money.  The gardens had landed intact thanks to his design, but they weren’t able to get them back up with Naoya incarnating hundreds or thousands of miles away before invaders smashed the entire thing.“Right now, I’m just setting up optimal power flows so that some energy will have collected by the time I’m in the mood to do something exotic with it, but I’m glad someone understands and appreciates my work, _Hiro_.” What happened to asking how Naoya was and how his project was coming along before starting with the demands?

“Sorry, but I have to be at the rehearsal soon and Yamato-“

“I’m happy to help someone who _appreciates my work_. Leave his patron here, I may have some questions for him,” Naoya said, waving at Al Saiduq.

“Patron?” Al Saiduq asked.

“The supernatural being that gives his family knowledge, training and power: You’re not a devil summoner cursed into the body of a black cat, but close enough.” Naoya didn’t quite have a soft spot for Gouto and other victims of so-called holy curses and punishments, but he generally didn’t make things any more difficult for them if they extended him the same courtesy. Generally. Jezebel in Amane’s body had killed the last summoner holding the title of Raidou Kuzunoha, protector of the capital when he came to protect the deva the Shomonkai intended to kill to break their seal protecting Tokyo, but at least Naoya hadn’t helped them: that was all Belberith and Jezebel’s power. Gouto obviously still wasn’t happy with him, and had tried to obliquely threaten him by mentioning how crossing a black cat brought bad luck, but Naoya was far from worried.


	8. Chapter 8

Hiro tried not to fidget, although he was certain that next to Joe he would look composed no matter what he did. Joe looked as nervous as though this was the real ceremony, as though he was worried his bride might realize her mistake and decide not to show up.

Even as everyone involved in the actual ceremony part was trying to be composed and well, not professional but treating this with the seriousness and a commitment deserved and the happiness weddings were supposed to have, various interested parties appeared to haggle over the seating arrangements.

Hiro was just glad, for his sake and theirs, that he wasn’t sitting down there and no one was arguing over who got to sit next to him. Neither his family nor Yamato were the type to back down.

The bride’s family was in the front on the bride’s side, Fumi had claimed a large area at the back so she could catch up with her foster family, Keita and the woman who came by and argued with him (his social worker?) had been designated as sitting at the back of the other side until the woman and Airi actually got here, at which point the four of them, with Airi’s father, ended up sitting in a row more towards the middle. Makoto had claimed seats for herself and Yamato by draping her jacket across them, but then Midori had shown up with the bow among a box full of other cosplay items she was using to mark seats for people and ended up not just sitting Ronaldo next to Makoto but Saiduq next to Yamato’s other side, hopefully because she was under the impression that the two of them were friends since they’d shown up together and suffered through costume-selecting along with Hiro. As for Ronaldo, he was a friend of Makoto’s, so he must be a friend of Yamato’s, right?

Haru and Himiko were up to the left of the stage in the ‘choir’ section. Abel, who had provided his sound system, rushed in a couple minutes after Hiro got here, taking his place after dusting the dirt off his hands. That neatly avoided the problem of who sat next to Abel, too, since people would want to catch up and Kaido, for example, might not wait until after the ceremony.

There was one section, guarded by Yuzu (who was among the ushers/coordinators and would be here the whole time in case anyone tried any funny business) where clearly she and Atsuro intended to sit, with Keisuke next to Atsuro & Yuzu on the outside in case she needed to get up to fix anything at the last minute.

It was probably Atsuro who had draped Naoya’s kimono over the chair behind him, next to two seats covered by Hiro and Abel’s father Kazuya’s old green jacket. Abel always called it the jacket of doom for some unknown reason, but their father never left it behind when they went on a trip. Ever. Even when traveling to a tropical island, apparently. Hiro was just glad Kazuya and Yuka were understanding about Naoya being Cain and Abel being king of much of the underworld now, but he supposed that since they’d taken Naoya in while Abel was very young, and Abel had his memories too, they were sort of used to their children being, well… When they came clean about it, Father probably said that it explained a lot and insisted on ruffling Naoya’s hair despite how old Naoya was then. He did that.

It would have been kind of interesting to see everyone try to rearrange everything so they could sit next to all their friends, but between Amane and Yuzu’s presence there was only a little optimization, not the kind of free-for-all Kaido might have preferred if Mari hadn’t moved them close to Atsuro and Keisuke anyway. Well, Keisuke he wasn’t the happiest about, but Mari had been their school nurse before the lockdown, so they were the ones she knew best.

Hiro found himself wishing they’d just hold the actual ceremony now, so he wouldn’t have to go through this twice, with the first time even longer due to everything getting stopped whenever anyone messed up. He’d much rather fight another of Al Saiduq’s relatives.

At least the people who were only here this round to claim seats could leave.

The things he did for his friends…

Well, he was kind of interested to see who got invoked for the ceremony. Was Midori serious, that they’d been considering Alcor? Hiro didn’t think Joe was especially religious, but if his bride was, they could call up Amaterasu herself. He just hoped she wasn’t Christian, although he probably would have heard about that by now. From Naoya, even if everyone else would probably either have been too nice to mention it or not cared enough. Well, no, she couldn’t be Christian or Amane wouldn’t be performing the ceremony, Hiro realized, and calmed down a little. The ceremony still seemed fairly Western, from the presence of a Best Man in the first place.

He was happy for his friend Joe and he didn’t want to mess up his part of this either, but he’d much rather be doing something…

…Like finding out if someone had included him in the family wedding gift or something, because it had only been two days, and he’d been focused on the bachelor party. It wasn’t exactly like he’d had time by himself to go shopping, either. The house was big, but not _huge_ : all the teenage boys had been assigned to a single room, with Yamato up on the bed in under the blankets because he’d gotten soaked. Abel had spent most of the first day hauling a ton of stuff including futons and blankets and letting people go back home to get nightclothes and toothbrushes: Atsuro too after Naoya turned him loose. Six of them in there: Al Saiduq had said that he really didn’t need a bed, but they weren’t going to leave him out. Keita kept accusing people of rolling over or not giving him enough space because he was still short. Even though they’d just had a really long day they were still all too excited to go to sleep for ages, and then last night was the bachelor party.

For a panicked moment he thought of giving them the island, but that would be regifting.

* * *

Airi left her father under Keita’s supervision and came over to take a look at Abel’s sound system and keyboard. “So you’re really studying music?” she asked him.

He nodded, pressing one of his headphones to his ears as he worked.

“Why? Shouldn’t you be studying politics, or, I don’t know…”

“Demon politics isn’t very much like human politics,” he told her, then added, “Thank goodness.” Then he glanced away from the equipment at her. “You’re the musician?”

“What? Oh, well, I was.” She looked down at her hands, then tucked a piece of hair behind one of her ears self-consciously. “Not anything… modern.”

“What’s wrong with traditional music?” he asked her. “3/4 time aside. And there are lots of rhythms besides heartbeat. It doesn’t have as much effect on most demons as on humans.” He doubted rock music would affect Al Saiduq as strongly as Haru’s, although right now he had a show to put together so this wasn’t the time to experiment. Well, maybe, “Would you mind playing something on the keyboard for me? Something simple so I can keep an eye on the equipment while you do?”

“Um, well, I guess I can see what I remember,” she said, sliding onto the bench as he vacated it and raising her hands above the keyboard.

* * *

Silver-haired Naoya appeared with the grey and white-haired boys in tow five minutes before the real ceremony and quickly observed the seating situation, picked up the bow marking Saiduq’s spot, moved Makoto’s jacket so it only covered one seat, moved Ronaldo’s over so he was still next to her and made room for the two boys by himself and Abel’s parents. If anyone asked, this was another part of the evil plan: the two of them adored children, and would certainly have had a second right after Abel if Naoya hadn’t been dropped into their laps and taken into their hearts. Really, Naoya had moved out because it was a little hard to work with an evil group bent on demon-summoning and other evil stuff when his stepmother kept knocking on his door and serving tea to his guests.

Yamato was contentedly pushing instant ramen noodles up into his mouth with a pair of chopsticks, taken from Naoya’s stash of all-nighter supplies. Hot, salty and possessed of absolutely no nutritional value whatsoever, aside from the salt and water themselves: his minders would have had a heart attack, although Yamato had no intention of having one. The heat still pooled in his stomach, like tea: the warmth radiating throughout him brought with it a feeling of well-being, that the world wasn’t such a really bad place, was a place where one could afford not to be aware and ready for attack all of the time. Inner peace was a risky thing that might bring with it complacency, but at the moment there wasn’t anything particularly wrong with his world. Well, yes, there was probably still panic in other parts of it, people being what they were, but it wasn’t his problem. Not unless he chose to make it so.

And he certainly should go back to JPs, at least for a little while, he’d already decided. They were used to his competent leadership: how would they be able to handle an incompetent political appointee that wouldn’t know how any of Yamato’s organization operated and would be looking for others to pin the blame on? Even if he found a half-competent successor, he would still have to retain a supervisory position so his choice wasn’t replaced with an incompetent the instant his back was turned. If he had to pick a successor Makoto was the obvious choice, but she wasn’t cynical enough to handle his superiors.

Yamato wondered if he could somehow send Ronaldo after _them._

Regardless, Yamato agreed with Naoya that college was a waste of time in and of itself: he could learn the material much more quickly with self-study and tutors, if necessary. However, attending would force them to give him valid non-classified ID and would begin creating a paper trail, on top of building contacts in the outside world.

He remembered a piece of candy pressed into his hands by a dying man, something he’d hoped to give to his daughter but wanted Yamato to have, even after Yamato verified that he knew who Yamato was. The head of JPs, who had denied them food. Who theoretically could have had all the candy he wanted. Not that he had ever been exposed to any until after he’d internalized the belief that he didn’t want any.

He wondered what that man must think of that conversation now that he was alive again as Naoya sat and gave his stepparents a dignified nod, only to be given a crushing hug by his petite little mother-aunt.

That seemed a little… far too demonstrative. In public, too! But although Naoya’s body was a little stiff, he didn’t seem embarrassed or displeased at all.

Yamato decided that the two of them must be worth meeting: Naoya seemed to think relatively highly of them, “for parents,” and while Cain and Abel had both come into this world with memories of other lives, they had actually raised Hiro, who didn’t recall much of Seth. That spoke highly of their capabilities and influence. Hiro had certainly seemed happy to see them, which immediately proved they weren’t anything like minders. So he stepped closer, Alcor trailing behind him with the bags of ramen, Ramune, squid-flavored chips, even more equally alien alleged foodstuffs & Hiro’s favorite candy that Naoya had decided to bring back with them from his apartment.

“I’m sure Hiro introduced them to you,” Naoya was saying.

“Yamato Hotsuin and Al Saiduq, yes?” his mother said, and smiled. “Why don’t you sit down?”

“By the way, how would you feel about grandchildren?” Naoya asked them as Yamato did and Saiduq looked for an out of the way place to put the bags before finally making them disappear. When both of his parents stared at him he told them, “Not the _normal_ way.” Of course not. He wouldn’t bring a child into this hell world, not when he knew how terrible even the modern world was compared to what should have been. “Al Saiduq needs an identity since he doesn’t want to go to the demon realm, so I’m considering forging him some papers. He looks young enough that he could be mine if he was born after the Lockdown, like Hiro.”

“Excuse me,” Yamato said, annoyed, “but if he is going to be put on someone’s family registry, it obviously must be mine. The fate of the Hotsuin clan has been intertwined with his for centuries.”

Naoya raised an eyebrow at him while Saiduq looked both shocked and touched. Yamato gathered his composure around him, grateful for the practice. If it was Hiro’s acceptance that made Alcor grant him the world he wished for, then how much more power would giving him a family, even if it wasn’t much of one, grant Yamato? If Hiro was worried about the septentrione, this would give him two reasons to visit Yamato.

He’d have to put up with Hiro spending most of his time at school, even though Yamato had reminded Naoya that the Hotsuin had more than enough wealth that Yamato could hire the best tutors. He supposed he could put up with Hiro spending time with those other friends of his. When he could think of it as maintaining assets. It didn’t mean Yamato was going to let an asset like Hiro slip through his fingers, let Hiro choose any of them over him ever again.

Even though it turned out that Alcor hadn’t lured Hiro away from him – Alcor clearly didn’t have the skills to do that – the thought of it had made him hate Alcor more than he hated him for the fate of the Hotsuin clan and Yamato’s own fate. It was fortunate that Naoya had reminded him of Hiro’s intelligence and skill before Yamato acted rashly, such as kidnapping Hiro away from his family (these other assets) or destroying Hiro’s useful acquisition. Yamato knew how angry he would be if someone killed Hiro, although of course Alcor wasn’t worth as much to Hiro as Hiro was to Yamato. Alcor was just an especially powerful or useful employee, even though he didn’t expect to be paid. Which Yamato supposed would make him even more valuable if one ever had to worry about money. It had been rather shocking to hear Hiro worry about the property taxes on this island and wonder if perhaps Alcor had actually made Hiro worse off with this gift of his.

“Hey, Naoya,” Atsuro said, leaning forward between the backs of Naoya and Yamato’s chairs. “I got satellite footage of the island.”

“So did I,” Naoya said. What of it?

“Over here, there’s a little bay: if we got more snorkeling equipment we could take the boat over there.”

“Not until I’ve set up the wards, we have small children with us and this used to be deep water.”

“When do you think you can set up the wards? Or should I?”

“I suppose you could set them almost as well.” And Naoya had things he’d rather do, like figure out where he was going to put the volcano. Without one, not only would this island be obviously unnatural to any geologist worth their salt, but it would be eroded away practically before Hiro had grandchildren to bring to it, from Naoya’s perspective on time. “Take Abel with you: I didn’t spend all these years training you for you to be dragged under by an annoyed kraken too quickly to summon anything.”

“What? There are demons here?”

“No, krakens are giant squid. They haven’t come up as often in modern times since there aren’t as many whales anymore. Then there are sharks and salt-water crocodiles, the ones that can easily top forty feet if they live long enough. Not all the earth’s dangerous animals have been declared demons, and the part of an island above the water is only the tip of an iceberg. There’s a gigantic mountain where there used to be open ocean: some of them might be confused enough to surface. I’ll have to look into how to create barrier reefs.”

“I am sorry, Ancient One,” Saiduq said, finally sitting.

Naoya raised his head from where he’d been calling up an elevation map. “Why are you apologizing to me? Animals, the life forms that live by eating others, are Abel’s domain. It’s not like you blocked off an undersea vent.” He told Saiduq that, “Apologizing too much is as annoying as not apologizing. If you have annoyed me, I will make sure you know what you’ve done.” He could count on that.

“The Shining One didn’t until I almost made him panic.” How strange it had been to see the collected Shining One practically jump out of his skin and almost beg or demand Al Saiduq _stop doing that_.

“Oh?” Atsuro asked. Sounded like an interesting story there, but then the wedding march struck up and he and Naoya quickly lowered their comps so no one would notice them. Naoya’s uncle and Yuzu still gave each of them a look, so they snapped them shut and put them away as the bride walked up the aisle to where Joe, Hiro, Amane and a friend of the bride waited, proceeded by Dr. Otome’s adopted daughter, Yuzu’s oldest  and some of the other female children that had been charging around the place since Hiro said that sure, they could invite anyone they wanted to a _private tropical island_.

Where Midori had the _best dress-up collection ever_.

Amane wore the exact same lotus-hat she’d worn during the Lockdown: since it had miraculously survived intact, it was her personal good-luck charm for all things demon-related. She still hadn’t had a chance to meet the Lucifer-equivalent, but since Polaris was clearly an evil god, or not _the_ God, she doubted a being who had come to the aid of God’s children was evil, so she hadn’t opposed Midori’s idea to use Al Saiduq as part of the décor so he could feel included in the wedding of one of his friends and the woman whose life and health he had restored even if he wasn’t up to resuming human form yet.

She’d made a note to do something about removing him from Naoya’s evil clutches before Naoya did anything worse than use him as a beast of burden for snack foods before the ceremony began, but now she was focused on the ceremony and offering prayers onto the Lord God and various other, lesser yet still benevolent deities.

His law said that one should have no other gods _before_ Him, after all. It also said to honor thy father and mother, and that those who aided His children had also aided Him.

So finding out who exactly the bride and groom wanted to give thanks to had been an important part of the preparations for the ceremony. Shiva, Kama and Lugh would normally be unusual choices for a Japanese couple, but Amane had included Lakshmi , Kama’s mother, in her personal devotions ever since the goddess aided her during the Lockdown.

Then she’d had to perform rituals to find out whether or not the gods wished to appear at the ceremony, because she’d read the tales of Kama and there were few things more disruptive to a ceremony than the arrival of an unexpected god. Rather like European fairy tales and uninvited fairies.

One unexpected god had already shown up: Loki had taken a place next to the dancer Hinako before the ceremony started, although they’d ceased their chatter when the procession began.

Amane’s inner peace and focus on the ceremony were made much easier under the circumstances by the megidolaon she had ready to cast, true. The presence of so many comps would protect the bystanders: one of the surprisingly thoughtful aspects of Naoya’s design.

She also knew that if Loki disrupted the ceremony and made this take any longer than it had to, he would have to deal with Naoya if he managed to survive her, and the trickster was no fool. Neither was Amane. As the shepard of these two souls, it was her duty to ensure that the blessing of their union went without a hitch other than the intended sort, just like the best man (who hadn’t turned his cell phone off before slipping it into his sleeve, so he could summon quickly if need be).

Just the fact it would take a great fool to interfere with a wedding attended by so many powerful devil summoners, including Cain and Abel themselves, didn’t help them much when the world was full of arrogant fools. And so was the underworld.

Here she was worried about someone trying to kill Naoya’s little brother and Naoya was, she heard, attempting to pull the pigtails she didn’t wear. She prayed Naoya’s grandfather would give her patience with his wayward yet beloved child.

At least she knew she wasn’t the only one prepared for the worst. Abel didn’t have bodyguards, he had friends.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, Abel and Hiro’s parents are versions of Kazuya and Yuka (MC and Heroine) from Shin Megami Tensei I that didn’t have a nuclear apocalypse happen to them. In-game, someone says Kazuya is Adam, implying Yuka might be Eve & so I couldn’t resist. 
> 
> I don’t think they’re aware of being Adam and Eve – the degree to which Hiro is aware of being Seth is because Lucifer told Abel and Abel told him after Naoya confirmed it. Neither of them actually met Seth, who was born after Abel died and Cain left, so there wasn’t any feeling of recognition or familiarity to begin with. However, there is a degree of recognition between Adam, Eve and their children, or so I’d think. Naoya, Abel and Hiro just put it down to them being great parents, since Lilith, who did recognize them, isn’t saying anything because if she did, Naoya’s issues would make him start avoiding them because while he protected Kazuya and Yuka’s son, he killed Adam and Eve’s. I’ve never said that Naoya was sensible about any of this.
> 
> I actually wrote this chapter and the above note before I saw the news about the DS manga where Abel’s name is Kazuya. Naming Adam’s son after Adam from another SMT game? Looks like the manga artist’s a fan.
> 
> I tend to interpret Lilith’s appearance in DS2 as her old babysitter instincts in action, although I doubt she was aware of that & just thought she was playing around. The humans with her weren’t being hurt by the demons, and they were certainly stronger (and healthier?) that most humans elsewhere.


	9. Chapter 9

“I still don’t understand why Hiro didn’t side with me,” Yamato said to Naoya in the clearing by the spring, before the wedding and after they’d discussed a few options. “Just because he intended to replace Polaris with Alcor didn’t mean he couldn’t have instituted a merit system.”

“Setting aside your grudge against Alcor and Alcor’s determination to create a world where humanity would have freedom for the moment,” because Naoya knew Yamato would assume Yamato had the intelligence to set aside his own grudge because it was the smart thing to do and Hiro said so, even though he hadn’t before. Not to mention the fact that while Al Saiduq was certainly weak against Seth’s-Hiro’s determination to do the best for his descendants, Naoya was quite sure that he would have put up some resistance to the idea of releasing mankind from Polaris just to put another set of constraints upon their free will, “Allow me to give you a piece of advice based on thousands of years of experience: _never hatch a plan that requires that human beings act intelligently_. That’s the flaw in both capitalism and democracy: they both assume that humans will make rational choices. The simple fact that poverty and inequality exist despite both those systems proves that humans _don’t_. And your merit system would have encountered the same problems.”

“Yes, I’m aware that most humans are fools. That’s the point of a merit system: to ensure that only the strong and intelligent would rise to power.” Honestly, did Naoya think that Yamato was blind, that glare asked.

Naoya put a hand on his forehead. “I suppose I should begin at the beginning. I’ll leave my grandfather out of it because I’m sure you know I’m not a neutral judge of _his_ intelligence, but keep in mind that my father was made in his image: a spiritual clone of God, in a body created from solid matter. Now, one of the things the Bible _does_ get right is the reason Eve was created and sexual difference came about in the first place: my father needed a _babysitter_. After around the dozenth time he fell out of a tree or drowned because he was talking to the birds or the fish and forgot he wasn’t one of them, Grandfather realized that he needed a minder. Obviously this minder had to be created more intelligent than Adam was so they wouldn’t make the same mistakes: are you with me so far? The first had enough intelligence and independent thought to decide that she didn’t want to spend the rest of her existence looking after her intellectual inferior, so she married a snake. Since reducing the intelligence would defeat the purpose, Grandfather created Eve from Adam, or rather from a portion of the divine essence within him, but placed her in a body that was made not from dead earth but from already living, organized matter. The two of them were the same being in two bodies, except that one of them was much smarter. Females were created smarter because they didn’t just have to look after themselves, they had to look after children. She looked after Adam, loved him as though he was herself, because he was.

“After she did her job for… time was a little disorganized back then, Lucifer decided to sneak into the garden disguised as Eve’s brother-in-law and tell her that God had changed his mind about eating from the tree of knowledge: now he _wanted_ both of them to do it, so Adam would stop being an infant and Eve would be better able to take care of him. Proving that even an instinctive grasp of physics, ecology and biology that would put Stephen Hawking to shame won’t keep someone from being _completely gullible_. My mother would believe absolutely anything even after she ate the fruit and knew that lies existed.”

“I _know_ that humans are fools.”

“Yes, but you clearly don’t realize how bad it really is, or you wouldn’t have created the plan you did. Pay attention: you’ll learn something. Fortunately for males like you and me, after the two of them were exiled Grandfather still wanted them to be able to have children, so he invented pregnancy. This involves the genes being mixed around, so these days men and women are equally intelligent thanks to my mother’s genes, although there are more extremely stupid men than extremely stupid women. It also allowed evolution to come about, the change of the physical body over time, and although genius is a property of the soul, I can testify that there have been significant hardware improvements over the millennia. Competition among humans means that mutations for superior intelligence spread _fast_. Since your genetic mother was selected, I’m sure you’re smarter than your ancestors, and they were very skilled engineers.” Which was not a compliment Naoya gave lightly.

“On top of that, you should know that all the intelligence in the world is useless without knowledge. Both raw information and training in how to think.” Logically, skeptically, understandingly. “You realize that you’re smarter than those around you, but have you realized that those around you, both those you selected for JPs and the people in charge of you, were far above average? Yes, even the ones who gained their posts by favoritism and the manipulation of others: that’s still a kind of intelligence. Those people were still superior to, oh, ninety-five? Ninety-eight? Percent of those around them. 100 is the average IQ, meaning half the population has less raw ability to understand what they observe than that.”

Now he pointed at Al Saiduq, who was silently observing the conversation. “Would you say that he’s intelligent? Or that he was? Smarter than you? Before this he had access to the near-infinite information of the Akashic Records, the genius to create a summoning application equal to mine and the ability to think independently enough, despite coming to existence as part of something like a hive mind, to end up with an opinion of humanity opposed to that of all his kin. He even had the intelligence to realize that despite this he was still incapable of understanding humanity well enough to make good decisions for them and the best thing he could do was to let humans make their own choices, even their own mistakes. Humans also have fundamental limitations and are incapable of understanding each other. This is because we are the same type of being as the Creator, who is unknowable. No human will ever perfectly understand another human being: there are several reasons this is absolutely impossible. By most measurements Alcor would be counted among the greatest geniuses in existence, and he’s _still_ a fool. Knowing that he was a fool who knew nothing was what made Socrates a genius.”

That was why it had so depressed Socrates when the Oracle at Delphi said that no one was wiser than him.

The smarter someone was, the more they knew how little they knew. Anyone who would claim they were wise was by definition a fool. Oh, someone could be wiser than those around them, but that wasn’t saying as much as Yamato seemed to think it did.

Yamato also knew the tale of Socrates. “So you’re saying that even the smartest and strongest humans are too stupid to be trusted to run society?”

“Absolutely,” Naoya agreed. “Even a benevolent dictator can’t do perfectly for his subjects: again, look at Grandfather. Even I will admit that he had good intentions and near-perfect knowledge, if not understanding. That didn’t keep him from aiding and abetting murder, rape and genocide – even his own Bible admits it. Individuals are better able to make decisions for themselves than any other individual is, given what they know. The least terrible system is one where individuals are nurtured _while_ allowing them to screw themselves over so the survivors learn what not to do, and where it’s not possible for anyone to gain too much power. No human is capable of understanding _everything,_ and it’s almost impossible for someone who trained hard enough to become the strongest and win control of a world of merit like yours to have spent time learning anything about _delegation_. Experts can get as good as they are in their fields because they specialize: look at your Fumi. What do you think she knows about conflict resolution?”

“Exactly nothing.”

“Exactly. Ronaldo’s system would have prevented humans from learning how to conduct their own affairs by separating them from consequences, and since everyone’s business would have been everyone else’s, all the good will in his world wouldn’t have saved them from destroying each other. Your system would have removed the leashes humans put on the free will of those around them, which seems like a good idea except those leashes are all that protect us from the ignorance of others. Do you know what the social contract is?”

That, Yamato didn’t.

“John Locke – the key component of a working human society is minimizing how little we infringe on each other: trading the right to rob others for the right to not be robbed. Read Hobbes as well before you try to reshape the world again. English. He thought of humans more as sinful than stupid, and believed that a benevolent intelligent dictator was _possible_ , but he was thinking about how to construct a society that would be minimally terrible to live in despite the fact that we are a race of fools cloned by a fool who wanted some company that possessed independent thought and didn’t even realize that this meant that we, by definition, had to be _independent_. In short, we humans were out of luck at the moment of our creation. The person who coined the word ‘utopia’ made it mean ‘nowhere,’ because he was less of a fool than most.” Naoya sighed. “For that matter, even Grandfather didn’t have a fair chance. He arose out of the universe: he is the universe observing itself, and as poor Pathygoras figured out, the universe is fundamentally irrational. Another Englishman said it best: a rational universe would have a decent value of pi.”

Naoya leaned on his pitchfork, looking up at the fluffy white clouds. The ones that looked so soft and blissful, but there was nothing there real enough to touch. “I’ve heard Makoto talking about you and your management style. You treat your employees well because you realize that’s only the smart thing to do. Most people aren’t so smart, or you would have been allowed enough freedom to be happy and wouldn’t want to leave the Japanese government’s service in the first place. Yes, a merit system would work if everyone was intelligent, or at least rational. The trouble is that even a _dictatorship_ will work if everyone’s rational, or even the man at the top. Sadly, no one is rational, and even a complete restructuring of the universe couldn’t make it that way. Otherwise, I would have tried that already,” he said wryly. “And I’m sure Alcor thought of it at some point, since he’d have his family still if they weren’t fools. Yet he didn’t even bring them back.”

“They wouldn’t be themselves if I changed them, Ancient One.” And it was his family he missed.

“As I said, you’re unusually intelligent,” Naoya complimented him. “So, Yamato, it was very _nice_ of you to try to create a utopia where the best would rule, instead of just a world where _you_ ruled. And your naivete is adorable. But the sooner you become realistically misanthropic, the happier you’ll be and the safer the rest of us will be, since you did destroy the world trying to create a paradise. What I’m telling you is that it’s just not possible, even for someone who controls Heaven’s Throne, so don’t do it again.”

Al Saiduq stared at him. “That wasn’t theoretical, was it, Ancient One?”

“You’re surprisingly perceptive.” This time Naoya frowned.

“I wondered… the Akashic Record is a _record_. It shouldn’t have been able to contain anything that didn’t exist in the original. A record isn’t the same as the original,” as the septentriones were different from the primal beings that shaped the original universe, “but Heaven’s Throne… Polaris’ power came from somewhere. And the concept of transfer of that power existed.” It was part of the history written out in the Record.

“Yes, I do hold that power. I wanted to overthrow heaven… Well, what really happened was that Abel wanted to have a _discussion_ with Grandfather about the curse he put on me for killing Abel.” Abel thought it was excessive even though he was the victim. “And the Ordeals.” The Lockdown itself. “Then Grandfather told him that he was the one that made me lose control of myself and actually kill Abel: I was certainly furious enough, but it turns out I would have been able to calm down instead of actually acting on the impulse if Grandfather hadn’t wanted to set an example for future generations. By deliberately inflicting the sins of Envy and Wrath upon humanity, not to mention depriving our already grieving parents of both their children.”

Naoya’s hand made a fist around the shaft of the pitchfork. “He’d lost Lucifer, Adam, Lilith and Eve, after all. Or perhaps he hadn’t relearned enough compassion or fairness yet to think it through that much. That’s what happens when someone casts part of their knowledge outside their mind, sealing it in a tree so that good and evil wouldn’t corrupt his children: Grandfather still had those selfish impulses, but he couldn’t realize that they were wrong the way we humans can because of Lucifer’s trollery and Mother’s gullibility.” Anyway, “Telling Abel that was another mistake: my brother put him down like a mad dog. Grandfather still exists: you can tell by the way the universe is still here, but I hold the throne of heaven now because my aunts and uncles need someone to serve. They don’t have free will, you see: if they don’t have _a_ god they’ll need one so desperately that they’ll create an illusion of Grandfather and then obey _that_. So yes, I could reshape creation. I’m just far too cynical to believe that would do anyone any good, which is probably why Abel’s let me keep it to begin with.”

“You’ve forgiven him, haven’t you? Because he couldn’t be expected to do any better.” The way Yamato had forgiven that employee that screwed up and apologized to Yamato for his failure, expecting to be punished. Yet a punishment was supposed to be a lesson, to teach someone to do better next time, and Yamato didn’t think that one was capable of doing any better, so he’d just told him to forget it and go.

“We are all flawed beings. And I can’t throw stones, can I? Humans _do_ have free will, after all. If part of me hadn’t wanted to kill my own brother, even Grandfather couldn’t have made me do it.” That was part of why the idea hadn’t occurred to Naoya after all this time, after all he’d been through because of the curse. He’d grown to hate Grandfather, but he still couldn’t help but love him, couldn’t help but think better of him than _that_. He was still family. “The road to this hell called earth was paved with good intentions and love. That’s why I’m never having children. What am I supposed to tell them when they accuse me of creating a terrible world for them and then screwing them up? That it was inevitable?” That it just wasn’t possible to do otherwise? True, but still excuses. “That’s why I can’t stand people who ruin everyone else’s work to make their lives and the world better, for the sake of their own grand plan.” Grandfather’s ordeals, Polaris’ destruction. Yamato’s own attempt to reshape the world. “So grow up, because next time you try to smash the board to make the game fair, you’ll face Abel and-the three of us,” Naoya corrected himself. “Hiro expects better of you than that, too.”

Hiro was still innocent that way.

And Yamato was more than innocent enough to want to live up to Hiro’s faith in him, young enough to want to prove Naoya wrong, that this world could be changed.

That was the real trick of gardening: the plants wanted to grow, so all you had to do was put them in the right places, with the right conditions, so they gave you what you wanted.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The angel-generated illusion of god happened in Shin Megami Tensei I. Gotou is from the Raidou Kuzunoha games: the Ayakashi Monthly is from Nocturne. I don’t own any of those, either. Nor do I own Terry Pratchett: the pi quote is from Pyramids.
> 
> Reading the Bible makes one feel far more compassion for God than listening to his fanclub/the people who haven’t read the bible. 
> 
> Of course, Naoya’s real reason for trying to disillusion Yamato was that he doesn’t want the world erased, it’s where he keeps half his stuff.


	10. Chapter 10

At the head of the grand table wasn’t a wedding cake, but instead a grand bowl adorned with rubies and emeralds, lapis and topaz, filled with peaches.

The scent of them overwhelmed the scent of the flowers that filled that island and everything that could possibly be pressed into service as a vase. Even Keita’s mouth was watering, and he didn’t even _like_ peaches.

“Naoya!” Abel yelled in the silence that came upon everyone as soon as they stepped into the clearing where the wedding feast was about to begin. “You can’t just leave those out! What if someone ate them and didn’t know what they were? I told you that if you _ever_ did that again…!” Hiro’s new friends and their families hadn’t seen him angry before. Hadn’t felt the power that filled the now-rising wind.

“I set wards,” Naoya told him, peeling off something that looked like a bar code sticker, as though he’d picked up that impressive piece of solid gold & precious stones at a store in some mall.

Fumi noted what a good idea that was: bar codes allowed storage of information that would allow someone to easily just print a custom seal by filling a few blanks into a program.

“What are those?” Ronaldo finally managed to say.

“My wedding gift,” Naoya said, stepping to the side so Joe and his new wife could get a clear view of the bowl. “The peaches of immortality.”

Makoto was taken aback. “As in Chinese mythology? And the legend of the Journey to the West?”

“Those too,” Naoya agreed. “They’re the fruit of the Tree of Life.”

“T-thank you,” Joe’s wife stammered out, clenching her husband’s hand tightly.

“What do they do, exactly?” Joe asked.

“Exactly what it says in the… Right.” Naoya sighed. Most printed book in the world, an incredible waste of trees, and even those who believed in it, or rather _especially_ those, never sat down and read it. “Physical immortality. The immortality humans were meant to possess from the beginning. Freedom from age, disease and infirmity. Times being what they are, I’ve already designed spells to allow myself and the rest of us to seem to age past our primes.” He nodded at Atsuro. “Between myself, my apprentice and Fumi, there’s no need to worry about the creation of new identities. I’m also considering expanding this island or turning it into a chain of them: even though my ambassador is on vacation, I sent messages to a few countries telling them to recognize it as an independent nation – and by the way, Seth, that’s your birthday present for this year.” Atsuro winced, because there was a reason he didn’t let Naoya handle his own diplomacy. Naoya and the word tact didn’t belong in the same sentence. “If you don’t want the fruit, I suppose I could give you a few servants. I have hordes of them floating around doing nothing.”

Joe opened his mouth, delighted, but closed it hurriedly when his wife elbowed him in the side. Well, he’d already decided that he wouldn’t be late again, that he’d start being responsible. And since the world had ended before the meeting started & he wasn’t fired, he still had a job.

“The peaches are fine,” his wife said quickly as Joe finished mourning his chance at a life of leisure.

“He didn’t tell us what they were the first time,” Atsuro reminisced as he helped Yuzu, Makoto and the rest of the responsible adults who weren’t taking the covers off the rest of the food and pouring drinks carry chairs from where they’d held the wedding to where they were going to eat. “It was after we won the fight, and instead of gloating or sitting on that throne to _rest_ , when Abel’s stomach growled Naoya looked thoughtful, disappeared and then came back with a bunch of peaches.” Atsuro was practically asleep on the marble floor before Naoya got back.

“I was so thirsty I would have drunk poison,” Yuzu remembered. “I ate so many I should have figured something was up when I didn’t get sick.” Juice dribbling down her chin, hands sticky enough it was almost an effort to detach them from her shirt when she tried to wipe them clean. “Naoya was smirking, but he just basically became god,” god help them, “and there never was anything unusual about _that_.” Naoya was Naoya. “The smirking, I mean. Although, come to think of it, he certainly always acted like he was god and the rest of us just had to do what he wanted. Except for Aunt Yuka. That’s Abel  & Hiro’s mom: Naoya called her Aunt Yuka, so Atsuro and I ended up doing it too, even though we’re not related.”

Atsuro nodded. “Aunt at _least_. I know I slip up and call her mom sometimes. She’s just like that, you know.”

Jungo nodded, Airi too. Keita scowled from behind a stack of ten folded chairs, which was as good as admitting it.

“Like she’s everybody in the neighborhood’s mom,” Yuzu agreed. “She organizes the local festival, and the PTA, and… everything.”

“You keep calling him Abel all the time,” Ronaldo said, curious. “That’s not his real name, right?” That would be one hell of a coincidence.

“No, he’s named Kazuya after his father. Naoya just started calling him Abel when he moved in, according to Mr. Kazuya, and they used his nickname all the time so they didn’t get mixed up,” Yuzu explained as she dropped her chair off & started heading back to pick up another.

“I didn’t know he had a normal first name for years,” Midori agreed cheerfully. “He tells everyone to call him Abel.” Except for teachers and people who were being formal and used his last name.

“He looks familiar somehow,” Airi’s father thought. “Mr… Minegeshi, was it?”

“Well, he isn’t exactly a police officer, but he does work with them. He manages a special canine unit that goes in after earthquakes and other disasters to find survivors, and trains guard dogs for the JSDF and stuff like that,” Yuzu told him. “Maybe that’s how you met?”

“Probably.” The police also used trained dogs for finding bombs, among other things.

The peaches were delicious, sun-warmed and so sweet it felt like a sin to slather them with cream or ice cream. It very well could be, Fumi thought, amused. Time, time to understand the universe in. Best gift ever. Mmm. She _wanted_ Naoya. JPs? Research budget? Who cared?

Armies of angels to experiment on? She steepled her hands together over the bowl, watching her quarry.

“I don’t think she’s blinking,” said Airi.

“Wafu…” Hinako swallowed and put down her spoon, electrum chiming against the gold bowl. “What?”

“Fumi. She looks like a snake,” Airi realized. “She’s staring at Naoya, haven’t you noticed? It’s really creeping me out.”

“Oh? More than usual?” Loki said, sitting across from Hinako. After looking her over, he muttered, “Well, that’s inconvenient.”

“What do you mean, usual? You’d better not think of doing anything to Fumi,” Airi told him, leveling her spoon at him. She’d been sitting with Hinako at the bachelorette party, she’d heard about the pranks he liked to pull from his own mouth.

“More than the usual magnetic attraction humans with angel, or fallen angel, blood have to those whose natures are so close to the divine. And these days, that means all humans. Angels were ‘programmed’ at their creation to adore god: it was written into their very souls. Even rebels couldn’t break free of it, and it was passed on to their descendants. Naoya, Abel and Hiro all have charisma of their own, but there’s a part of both of you that wants nothing more than to kneel at their feet and sing your adoration eternally, become an army to conquer the world in their names so everyone can share that mindless bliss.” Loki rolled his eyes. “No wonder YHVH got sick of his angels so quickly, after making them into such toadies. Lucifer was his favorite because Lucifer somehow managed to have a spine. He’s still obsessed with his creator. Keeps inserting him into every conversation to the point that it bores me terribly.

“Oh, I’ve seen some who manage to fight it enough to hate Cain or even Abel on sight, feeling that impulse to submit and violently rejecting it, but hate and love are two sides of the same coin, they’re both forces that pull us towards others. In times when humans were more aware of the worlds around them, they might have recognized what was happening, guessed that they were children of a god or suspected that they were casting a glamour on them. But this is something else. Your friend is, shall we say, single-minded. She’s never been attracted like this to anyone, or even especially interested in anyone, including Hiro. She would be intelligent, of course. A large amount of magical power,” was a given. “So much for the theory that Naoya’s lack of conscience was because it was in the part of his soul that was surgically removed.”

“Huh? What?” Hinako asked, startled.

Loki waved a flamboyant hand at the part of the tables where Hiro’s family sat. “Adam, Abel and Cain all had parts of their souls taken from them and placed in separate bodies. Your Hiro escaped that fate because his grandfather thought that breeding with his brothers’ other halves would be enough, as long as he made a good effort to be fruitful and multiply.” He glanced around, then decided it didn’t matter if this was no longer a secret: the real reason he’d kept it so was to annoy Naoya when he found out. “The singer Haru is Abel’s other half, although it puzzled me that she longed for death while she was in the Lockdown.” What had that said about her other half, the one Loki actually cared about because he was Naoya’s weak point? Was it a reflection of how guilty he felt for everything that had happened to his brother and the world because of him? “In any case, that’s why she possesses such an affinity for the universal language, and so much power half the Bels were desperate to destroy or possess her even though they didn’t know she was another Bel.”

“So they’re soulmates?” Hinako’s eyebrows rose. “I didn’t think those existed.”

“They don’t, not in the sense of two souls intended for each other. The three of them are single souls split in two. Look at Abel and Haru, then look at your Hiro’s parents.” The way they were turned slightly towards each other was the least of the many signs. “When they met each other, there would have been an instant connection. It’s really self-love, but probably that’s why their creator thought of it. Although I doubt he had the honesty to admit that he was a little too enthralled with himself.” He’d certainly expected his creations to adore him as much as he adored himself, no matter how he mistreated them. As a father, Loki couldn’t condone that sort of thing. Oh, everyone else was fair game to Loki, but not children, especially one’s own.

“Darn.” Airi pouted. “So it’s not romantic after all.” A proper universe should contain soulmates, she thought like the girl she was. If this happened again, she was going to get Al Saiduq to make people soulmates. Maybe…. Aargh, why did she keep thinking of that annoying standoffish Keita!

“I’m going to get another peach,” Hinako decided.

“Get some brandy while you’re up, I’ll show you a tasty trick.” He was a fire god, after all.

“So _Fumi’s_ going to get a guy?” Before she did? Well, Fumi was older, Airi knew, but still! Fumi! Any sane guy would run away! Jungo hadn’t run away from her experiments, but that was because Jungo was pretty slow. She liked him after all, but he was so, so… _Jungo_.

If she used a zan spell to launch the bouquet after it was tossed, and then ran really fast in that direction while everyone else was still staring…

Yeah, it was a superstition, but she’d had stupid Kama oogle her belly button.

Unfortunately, Yamato had the same idea, and the two of them kept hitting it higher and higher like a volleyball until Al Saiduq got worried that Mrs. Yuzuru’s flowers would be ruined and flew up there to keep it from getting smashed when it hit the ground.

After he landed, Airi stamped up to him. “Girls are supposed to catch the bouquet! Girls!” He was cheating! Alright, yes, she’d started the cheating, but still!

“Oh. Human customs are so interesting. Does this help?” Al Saiduq asked.

Since he was wearing a flowing costume, it took Airi a minute to notice anything different, but then he lowered his arms, and she saw the fabric cling to the curve of a delicate waist unlike her stocky, practically nonexistent one. Above it were the slight mounds of small, tasteful breasts the opposite of her own, which Airi was well aware were grotesquely huge for her age, the relic of when she’d been seriously overweight. There was only one thing to say to that. “Aargh!”

Al Saiduq blinked after her as she stalked off and Hiro caught up to him, Yamato, Midori and Hiro’s parents following him. Yamato’s scowl convinced him that the former septentrione really had done something wrong. “Oh dear,” she sighed as Midori stepped close and looked her up and down.

Midori’s eyes sparkled as she felt one of Alcor’s too-thin arms. “I know some people who would love to hire you as a model, if you ever need money.” The practically-emaciated look and white hair that might not technically be natural, but it didn’t need dye, either.

“The people in magazine photographs? I modeled my Ticos on them.” If that was what humans were used to looking at. “But would humans really want to look at me?” Why?

“Leave that up to Aunt Midori,” she said, patting Alcor’s shoulder. “Come on, let’s find you a bikini while everyone’s digesting.”

* * *

Hiro’s parents found out (thanks to Naoya, Abel or Hiro himself) that Yamato had never had home cooking and Al Saiduq had barely had any food at all.

The two of them were invited to come over for dinner, or every meal, or better yet stay at the couple’s home in Naoya and Abel’s old rooms until everything with the government got sorted out. Oh, and take packed lunches with them when Makoto arrived not with Yamato’s limo but with her personal, more discreet car to take them to JPs.

Hiro and Daichi begged them to _please_ stay, because if they did Hiro’s mother would pull out all the stops and cook all their favorites. Io also became a frequent guest.

Abel and Naoya found out that their mother was going to be making all her best recipes and showed up for the dinners, which expanded to include Naoya’s apprentice, Yuzu and of course Makoto should take a packed lunch with her, since she was going to so much trouble. And stay for dinner. And bring that nice young man Ronaldo with her, when he was in the area.

Joe and his new wife were still on the island, celebrating their honeymoon. Keita was also staying there for now, trying out the whole meditation training camp thing to see if it helped his boxing. Hinako and Airi had joined Haru and Abel at Gin’s bar and Abel’s apartment/studio. Airi was using Abel’s keyboard to remember her old skills and train to become Hinako’s accompanist. Her father had been offered his job back, since they believed he was just part of the mass resurrection. Gin found Jungo a job with a friend of his, since Gin’s bar was too far away from his home for him to commute.

Dr. Otome was once again busy at JPs, studying all the resurrected members as well as making sure that they were fine, as the world’s level of supernatural activity returned to normal after the stunned near-silence that followed the world’s restoration. After, of course, she and her daughter took a family bonding vacation on Hiro’s awesome tropical island.

Fumi continued her work at JPs, but she began to correspond via e-mail with Naoya, picking his brains on advanced magical theory. When the two of them worked together they looked rather alike, and made Hiro remember what Fumi said, about how every scientist had to be a little bit mad. Saiduq made a durable test subject, but sadly he wasn’t much help when she wanted to study humans.

Yamato continued his survey of junk food with the ruthlessness and demand for the best that characterized him in all aspects of life, tracking down the okonomiyaki vendor who had just given Yamato the first non-health-food he’d ever eaten and hiring him to work at the local JPs cafeteria (making Yamato even more beloved by his staff) and giving the man with the candy a scholarship for his daughter. The former rioters were very understanding about JPs not sharing their food and resources now that JPs actually had done something worthwhile with them and gotten them their old lives back.

Ronaldo and his mentor continued their investigative work, this time investigating Yamato’s superiors, the ones who had authorized the shooting of nosy people and the creation of psycho test tube babies (coughYamatocough) for their nefarious purposes.

Naoya tripped over a black cat in an alley, but was fine except for a scraped knee.

Abel and Haru continued to sometimes discuss adding more band members, but didn’t think they’d get around to it anytime soon. Not until he got his PhD and Airi graduated, at least.

Hinako took finding out she was a demigoddess rather well, and decided to embrace her heritage by learning their traditional dances, since there was an opening in the Norse pantheon for a goddess of dance.

Al Saiduq mostly stopped appearing behind people, but that was because the dimension he used to wander in and out of wasn’t there anymore. After Midori chopped off most of the bird’s nest passing for hair, taught Saiduq how to use a comb and took him shopping (refusing repayment, because he’d helped cute little Hiro), he was upgraded to dangerously cute and often had to be rescued from the clutches of new JPs staff, ladies at the marketplace and strangers with candy.

And so they all survived happily ever after, or at least until the next time humanity was doomed.


End file.
